LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

S§a? ?tr|^ng|l 3fxu 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART 

AND 

OTHER SERMONS 



J. E. RANKIN 




BOSTON 

D. LOTHHOP AND CO., FRANKLIN ST. 
NEW YORK 
H. E. SIMMONS, 150 NASSAU ST. 



Copyright, 1886, 
by 

D. Lothrop & Company. 



LC Control Number 

■ill 

tmp96 029065 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PACIE 

The Atheism of the Heart. ... i 

The Revelation of the Father. . . 21 
The Gospel After Man, and the Gospel 

After God . . . . . . 41 

Bearing One Another's Burdens . . 67 

The First and the Last Adam ... 85 

The Oneness of Blood of all Humanity . 103 

The Kingdom of Truth . . . . 121 

The Knowable Things of God . . . 139 

The Law of Adaptation in Spiritual Things 157 

The Witness Within . . . . . 175 

Martin Luther 201 



) 



SERMONS. 



I, 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 

Psalm xiv : I. "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no 
God." 

With the Hebrew, the idea of wisdom included virtue 
and piety. A man who was not virtuous and pious was 
a fool. The Hebrew word here rendered fool means a 
simpleton, an imbecile ; a moral simpleton, a moral im- 
becile. For the Hebrew had other words for the folly of 
the idiot and the madman. This title does not relate to 
a man's mental capacity, but to the moral use he makes 
of it. And, in this sense, the more a man knows with- 
out knowing God, the greater fool he is. With the He- 
brew, every man was gauged by his estimate of God. 
And if he said there was no God, it was the surest test 
t'lat could be applied to him : denying God he betrayed 
himself to be a fool. It fixed him as a moral simpleton, 
an imbecile ; not weak as we say, in his upper story, 
meaning the brain, but weak in the moral foundations of 
his nature ; where, if there is weakness, it affects the 
whole structure. 

This bandying about of opprobrious epithets in the 
Bible is not pleasant to us. The Bible is a book of the 



2 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 



greatest courtesy. It is courteous to a creature of 
God to tell him the truth This is the only book 
which always tells the truth. This is one unanswer- 
able argument for its divinity. God is a God of 
truth. Man's utterances vary with circumstances ; ac- 
cording to his interest. The Psalmist said, "I said 
in my haste, all men are liars !" In his haste, he said 
just what he thought. He knew himself, he knew other 
men, and he blurted it out. Here is a book written by 
sixty different men, hundreds of years apart, in which 
there is no man who figures as a liar. Adam is an apos- 
tate ; Moses is not permitted to enter the promised land ; 
David is guilty of the blood of Uriah • Judas betrays 
Christ ; Peter and all the rest deny Him. But writing 
their own biography, there is not a liar among them. 
They nothing extenuate ; and set down naught in malice. 
The writers of the Bible all tell the truth. They all tell 
the truth about themselves ; record what is to their own 
discredit. Robert Burns writes, 

" But, Oh, mankind is unco weak, 

And little to be trusted ; 
If self the wav'ring balance shake, 

It's rarely right adjusted." 

Robert Burns knew humanity. The writers of the Bible 
were not left to themselves. The balance of the writers 
of the Bible was always right adjusted. There was a 
Hand which kept self from shaking the balance. They 
never used false weights. If it had been in them to falsify 
about anything, it would have been about themselves ; 
not about miracles and wonders wrought by Jehovah ; by 
the Man Christ Jesus. There has never been any other 
truthful biography than that of the Bible. If the personal 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 



3 



history of the great heroes of the Bible had been written 
by uninspired men, if it had been revised by a Publish- 
ing Committee of the American Tract Society, or the 
Congregational Publishing Society, the blots and blem- 
ishes of their character would have been omitted, for fear 
of injuring the sale of the book, or the moral influence of 
it. The Bible is the only book in the world that has ever 
dared to speak the whole truth. 

" The fool has said in his heart, there is no God." 

THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 

This shall be the subject of this morning's discussion. 

I. What is Atheism ? It is godlessness. It does not 
sound so well in English as it does in Greek. An Athe- 
ist is a without -God man ! The Atheist has thought 
God out of his head ; hated him out of his heart. I 
have the Bible for it : " God is not in all his thoughts." 
" The carnal mind is enmity against God." The agnos- 
tic is an atheistic polywog in the process of evolution into 
atheistic frogship. Now, he wiggles his tail in self-com- 
placent unconsciousness ; soon he will sit upon a log and 
croak : There is no God ! Now he knows not whether 
there be any God ; soon he will know there is no God. 

Godlessness is just the opposite of godliness. It is on 
the negative side of the unit. Godliness is likeness to 
God. A man cannot be like God without believing in 
God ; without having God in his thoughts, and in his 
heart ; without having God as a moral standard. One 
of the proofs that there is a God, is man's need of such a 
Being as a moral standard ; as an ideal with which to 
compare himself ; toward which to struggle upward ; his 
need of such a Being as a rewarder of them that dili- 



4 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 



gently seek Him. The Saviour says, " Be ye also perfect, 
as your Father in Heaven is perfect." God is perfection. 
And Jesus said to the Jews : " He that hath seen me, 
hath seen the Father." Suppose now we get rid of God 
as the Creator. Matter we will say is eternal. Out of 
matter in its primordial forms, first were evolved the 
worlds ; and then the animals and men that people the 
worlds. Prove it all, as it never was proved, or can be 
proved. Does that make me an atheist? No, let the 
worlds go. The instant I reach the level of moral con- 
sciousness, I want a God and Father for my own sake. 
You say, "The worlds do not need a Creator;" I say, 
"I need a Father." I want a perfect Being to call my 
Father ; to take my cue from ; to worship ; to commune 
with ; to imitate ; to hope in ; to have fellowship with 
here and in Heaven. It is a necessity of human nature. 
The finite must need the Infinite. God has made me to 
look up. If there is nothing there, why did He make 
me so? 

There is nothing perfect in this world. The geometri- 
cian never draws a perfect line, a perfect curve, a perfect 
angle. The architect never puts up a perfect structure. 
St. Peter's Dome is only an approach to perfection. The 
merchant never gives exact measure ; has no exact stand- 
ard of measurement for his goods. The tailor never 
makes an exact fit ; nor the dressmaker. The judge 
never pronounces a sentence strictly and exactly just. 
The painter never makes a perfect picture. The drawing 
of the geometrician, the building of the architect, the 
measure of the merchant, the coat of the tailor, the dress 
of the dressmaker, the picture of the painter, the decision 
of the judge ; these things are only relatively perfect ; 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 



5 



they are perfect, so to speak, as things go. We go 
through the world, classifying things as good or bad ; as 
true or false : as just or unjust ; as orderly or disorderly ; 
as beautiful or ugly ; as perfect or imperfect. What do 
we mean ? God has made us so, that we conceive of an 
ideal standard of excellence in everything ; and with this 
standard we compare everything. It is so with our own 
character and conduct ; how comes it so ? 

Is there a difference between right and wrong? My 
conscience tells me that there is. I look at this act which 
conscience condemns to-day. It condemns it to-morrow ; 
next week, next year ; in America, in England, in India, 
in Africa. Go all round the world with it ; look at it, 
wherever you please. It is always the same. I know 
that if I should fall asleep, and sleep for eternal ages, the 
moment I should wake, I should see it unchanged. There 
is something within me, higher than I am ; better than I 
am ; wiser than I am ; confined to no period, to no lati- 
tude, to no customs or laws of man, that judges my ac- 
tions. Like a lightning flash I have an intuition that is 
irreversible. I can not argue it down ; I can not drown 
it ; I can not wash it out ; I can not sweeten it. The 
materialist tells me that this comes from my physical 
conditions ; that it springs from my diet ; that if I eat 
fish, there is one result ; more phosphorus on the brain ; 
that if I eat fowl, another result, less phosphorus ; that 
the brain works automatically. 

Study the working of conscience in Hamlet's uncle 
and Lady Macbeth ; the first has killed his brother and 
married his brother's wife ; the second has stirred up her 
husband to murder his king, and sits with the usurper on 
the throne. Why do these great tragedies so lay hold of 



6 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 



our attention, so rivet our souls ; have such fascination 
for us, if conscience is nothing? if conscience stands for 
nothing ? if there is nothing back of it ? It is only an 
illustration of the truth, that as face answers to face in 
water, so the heart of man to man. Shakespeare has only 
held the mirror up to Nature ! You know, that made as 
you are made, I know that made as I am made, having 
committed these crimes, we should feel just as the great 
Dramatist represents these people to feel. For the mo- 
ment, it is with us as though these intuitions of con- 
science, this restlessness and remorse of theirs were our 
own ; because they are so human. As we read, we are 
Hamlet's uncle, we are Lady Macbeth. He turns this 
electric light of his genius into our souls ; given certain 
moral and spiritual conditions there. Were not this the 
case, we should laugh at him. If there were no eternal 
law of right and wrong within us, we should look upon 
Hamlet and Macbeth as puppets ; like a higher order of 
Punch and Judy ; just as we look upon the automatic ac- 
tion of some artificial device to amuse children. Wind 
up this machine, and here we have the colored preacher 
holding his book in one hand, and gesticulating with the 
other ; or, here we have the clog-dance of old plantation 
times. But these men and women of Shakespeare are 
realities. 

Atheism takes away the perfect standard which man 
needs in morals ; to which his conscience points him. 
Who has made man so, that when Hamlet's uncle poisons 
his own brother, and weds his widow, this is the language 
of his soul ? 

" O, my offence is rank, it smells to Heav'n : 
It hath the primal eldest curse upon it, 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 



7 



A brother's murder ! Pray can I not, 
Though inclination be as sharp as t'will. 
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent ; 
And like a man to double business bound, 
I stand in pause, where I shall first begin, 
And both neglect." 

Who has made man so, that when Lady Macbeth has in- 
stigated her husband to commit murder after murder, she 
can not sleep? If this is the automatic action of .ma- 
chines, who made the machines? A murder shuts up 
Heaven to a man who would pray. A murder destroys 
the possibility of sleep. If we are made so, who made 
us so? 

There is nothing more clearly distinguished than the 
cerebral action in animals and men. How can you evolve 
moral sense from material sense? When a man runs 
away with a horse, you arrest him, try him, convict him, 
sentence him. When a horse runs away with a man, who 
thinks of taking the horse before a magistrate, and get- 
ting judgment against him? -But if they are alike mate- 
rial, why should you not? But if it were true, and 
could be demonstrated that I have come up from proto- 
plasm, through all the forms of the lower animals ; up 
slowly and painfully through czon upon ceon of evolution, 
out of material chaos and midnight through twilight to 
morning, until, at last, I discern the difference between 
evil and good ; until at last, I see men as trees walking ; 
I feel a weight upon my soul when I have done wrong ; 
a stain there which I would have washed away, then my 
soul from its veriest depths cries out for God ; I want a 
Deliverer ; I want a Helper ; I want a Father and Friend. 
The feeling of responsibility to a higher law within my 
own bosom ; a law which I approve, but do not always 



8 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 



obey ; this indicates to me that there is a moral govern- 
ment in the Universe, and I am out of relations with it. 

II. The first atheism of our nature is always the athe- 
ism of the heart. First, I persuade myself that I do not 
want any such government as God's government ; that I 
do not want any such Being as God is; then I try to 
convince myself that there is no such government, no 
such Being. There never would have been any atheism, 
if there had not been an apostasy. There is no atheism 
without an apostasy ; there is no atheist, who is not an 
apostate. If man were as God made him, and as God 
would have him, it would be just as natural for him to 
believe in God, as to breathe ; in every breath of his is 
proof that there is a God. In God's hand man's breath 
is ; the breath of the atheist is ; of the being who can 
not find God in all the universe. God is just as near to 
him in his material nature as that. The atheist is like an 
old lady with her spectacles perched up on her brow, 
who is rummaging all over the house to find them. God 
is everywhere, but he can not find Him. 

If God is a Spirit and man is a spirit, the first recogni- 
tion they should make of each other, is spiritual. God 
is nearer to man as a Father, than He is to him as a Crea- 
tor. God is not outside in the material universe, as He 
is in the spirit of every being made in His image. You 
do not need to look out the window to find God ; He is 
in his holy temple, the soul of man. Of course, you can 
get outside of yourself, and find evidence of God there ; 
but the first evidence is within. God is a Father, and 
you are a child ; this is just as true as the statement : 
God is a Creator, and you are a creature. We have got 
to come to this. When we apply rcientific methods to 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 



9 



spiritual things, we have got to take the testimony of 
those who are spiritual, as to spiritual things. I can not 
see what the Astronomer sees in his telescope. I have 
not been trained to study the heavens as he does. I take 
his testimony. I can not see what the microscopist sees 
in his microscope. He sees Nature weaving her delicate 
tissues into the web of organic life. I take his testimony. 
Those who deny the Divine Nature of tbe Lord Jesus 
Christ, do yet admit that as Shakespeare and Milton had 
intellectual genius, He had moral genius ; the power of 
intuitive discernment, as to spiritual things. He teaches 
that he had communion with God ; and that God always 
answered Him in prayer, because He always pleased 
Him ; that He came to do the will of the Father ; that 
He did the will of the Father ; that He was conscious of 
the Father's approval. Now, why not take His testimony 
just as you take the testimony of Newton and Laplace 
as to material facts ? It is not scientific for you men 
who claim that men should listen to your disclosures of 
what you see with your material organs, and your mate- 
rial instruments, either to withhold your credit from these 
statements of Jesus of Nazareth, or to ask for material 
proofs that they were facts, because you have no observa- 
tion of them. The Bible claims that spiritual things are 
spiritually discerned ; that the man who has an obedient 
spirit has his spiritual organs open ; and that the man 
who has a disobedient spirit has them shut. I cited the 
testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ as to spiritual inter- 
communication with the Father, as to the fact of them. 
Now, I intend to go farther. I have already called your 
attention to this fact :. That so far as their own faults 
and sins are concerned, the writers of the Bible were 



IO 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 



truthful men. They recorded their own awful apostasy 
from their Master. One of them tells us how Peter not 
only betrayed Him, but began to curse and to swear that 
he did not know the Man. Materialists and infidels 
would hardly be willing to be as frank as to themselves. 
Now these men, the followers of this Jesus of Nazareth, 
give the same testimony, as does their Master, as to their 
communion with God in prayer ; as to the reality of the 
spiritual world. They have been succeeded by genera- 
tion after generation of men, and women, and children, 
who testify to the same thing. As spirit is more real 
than matter ; as spirit has more direct access to spirit 
through spirit than through matter, I claim that the only 
scientific treatment of this testimony, is to admit its va- 
lidity ! Facts as to what is discovered in the scientific 
world are substantiated only by the testimony of just 
such men as these. Sir Isaac Newton published to the 
world the fact, that every ray of white light is made up 
of seven distinct rays of different colors. Experimenting 
with the solar system, he had discovered this. But, he 
also, discovered evidence that there is a God, and wrote 
in defence of this fact also. When he came to die in his 
ripe old age, he had deserved the couplet of Pope : 

" Nature and her works lay hid in night : 
God said, Let Newton be ! and all was light." 

But he had also merited what was written in Latin on his 
tombstone in Westminster Abbey : " An industrious, sa- 
gacious and faithful interpreter of the Sacred Scriptures. 
In his philosophy he vindicated the greatness of the Su- 
preme Being ; in his life, the simplicity of the Gospel." 

But perhaps, you say, " We can verify scientific facts. 
We can analyze a ray of light for ourselves. We can not 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 



1 1 



verify spiritual facts." There is just where you are mis- 
taken. Spiritual facts lie about us from our birth to our 
death. Enoch walked with God, and had this testimony, 
that with him God was well pleased. You and I can 
walk with God and have the same testimony. The same 
kind of walk will please Him as pleased Him in the days 
of the patriarchs. And I venture the assertion, that S3 
prevalent in this country, and in all Christian countries, 
is a type of piety, similar in kind if not in degree to that 
of Enoch, that there is not a materialist living, who has 
not seen, say, in his father, or mother, his wife, or in 
some revered teacher or friend, such evidence of genuine 
piety, that he has said over and over again in his life, 
" If there is such a thing as a Christian in modern times, 
that man, that woman is a Christian." Scientific facts 
are not verified without fulfilling scientific conditions. 
Spiritual truth is nearer level to an humble man's appre- 
hension than any other truth. When Sir Isaac Newton 
studies geometrical propositions, they seem to him much 
as axioms seem to you and me. They do not need 
demonstrations ; they are intuitions. We are not on a 
level with him. When he discusses higher mathematics, 
we can no longer follow him in his princely flight. We 
can fly from tree to tree ; he strikes out boldly Heaven- 
ward. We can not verify his results in infinitessimal 
analysis. Newton and Leibnitz had some personal dif- 
ference as to who first invented some of those higher 
methods of mathematical calculation. But how many 
mathematicians would be competent to sit in judgment 
on such a question and determine it ? 

What the Saviour as Son of Man claimed for Himself, 
He claimed for His disciples, in proportion as they are 



I 2 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 



like Him : namely, indwelling in God ; communion with 
God; God's society ; God's approval. Just as the sci- 
entific method in material things requires the fulfillment 
of scientific conditions in order to the knowledge of ma- 
terial facts, so the scientific method in spiritual things 
requires the fulfillment of spiritual conditions, in order 
to a knowledge of spiritual facts. There are certain 
physical natures that never could make good microscop- 
ists. " But the natural man receiveth not the things of 
the Spirit of God, neither can he know them, for they 
are spiritually discerned." Spiritual things are discerned 
through the spirit ; intellectual things through the intel- 
lect ; material things through the material senses. What- 
ever the nature of the object, there is an organ of appro- 
priation adapted to it. Now the advantage which spiritual 
truths have over other truths, which can be apprehended 
only by the highest intellectual qualities, and after severe 
mathematical training, is that they are level to the hum- 
blest of God's creatures. " The wayfaring man though 
a fool shall not err therein." The Lord Jesus told His 
countrymen, that men should come from the East and 
the West, and the North and the South, and sit down in 
the kingdom of God, while they themselves should be 
thrust out. So we may say, They shall come from the 
hamlets, and cottages, and hovels ; they shall come from 
the Sunday Schools, and the Mission Schools ; they shall 
come from the Nurseries of our children, and sit down 
in the kingdom of God ; while the men who were wise 
in their own conceit ; the men who insisted that God is 
to be apprehended only through the outward senses and 
the intellectual faculties ; the men from the laboratories 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 1 3 

and the libraries, who never looked higher, shall be 
thrust out. 

III. Atheism of the heart is always followed by atheism 
of the head. If a man has no room for God in his spirit- 
ual nature, he has no room for Him in his intellectual 
nature. Crowd God out of your heart, and out of your 
life, and you will soon crowd Him out of your head ; out 
of your thought. Or, at any rate, that will be the ten- 
dency and danger. 

Of course, I believe that belief in God may be ap- 
proached from without ; that you can prove that there is 
a God from Nature ; from design in Nature ; that He has 
written His autograph in the gold letters of the skies ; 
that He has stereotyped His footprints in the rocks ; and 
that the man, who, on examining an invention, and see- 
ing design in it, infers an inventor, has been purposely 
so made by Him, that from the works of Nature and de- 
sign in the works of Nature, he must infer a Creator ; and 
that he stultifies himself, and is a witness against himself 
when he refuses the same conclusion in the two cases. 
We who examine human inventions and issue human 
patents, giving the maker his right in the thing made, 
will at last, stand before the Supreme Inventor, and an- 
swer Him, why we denied Him a patent. It is true, a 
man says, " With regard to the creation of a world, I have 
no experience. But with regard to the invention of ma- 
chinery, I have experience. I know, from observation, 
that a machine does not come into existence of itself." 
Well, whether it be an original principle of your nature, 
as I believe, or whether you have been taught it by ob- 
servation, you admit that it is now a principle, as the 
Bible phrases it, that " every house is builded by some 



14 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 



hian." If you see a jackknife, you know it had a maker, 
without looking on the blade to see if there is any name 
there ; to see Rogers' cutlery, proves Rogers. But you 
come to a steam-engine. You have seen a jackknife 
made, but not a steam-engine. This thing, you say, 
must have evolved itself out of the dust in iron mines. 
You say you must now see a steam-engine made in order 
to believe that it had a maker. Every new thing made, 
must prove itself to be made. I say, Once admit the 
principle, that the existence of a house requires us to be- 
lieve that this house had a builder ; the existence of a 
thing made, requires us to believe that it had a maker, 
and you are bound to apply it in every department 
where a thing made shows design ; shows forethought 
and providence. You cannot stop short of it without 
stultifying yourself. And the higher up in the grade of 
mechanism you rise, the more complicated the mechan- 
ism, the stronger the argument. 

But except for the sake of argument, most men do not 
approach the proof of the being of a God, from the side 
of Nature. They carry it in their inward mechanism ; in 
their own consciousness. Just think of it a moment ; it 
is a startling thing ; that He who spake as never man 
spake, does not use the arguments employed by modern 
theologians, or even by the Apostles themselves. He 
does not condescend to use them. He adopts a more 
direct method. He spake as one who had authority. 
He showed His commission. He who needs no search- 
warrant to find us out, always assumes that man knows 
in his own heart, that there is a God. He never tries to 
prove it ; this Man, with a genius for moral intuitions. 
It is true, He is addressing a nation which has been ac- 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 



15 



quainted with God for generations ; whose sacred writings 
read : " The heavens declare the glory of God, and the 
firmament showeth his handiwork." But he does not 
talk to them about living, and moving, and having their 
being in God ; about God's giving men rain from heaven, 
and fruitful seasons, and filling their hearts with food and 
gladness. This is not the witness to which he alludes. 
He does not talk to them about God's eternal power and 
godhead, as they may be inferred from the things that 
are made. His address is always spiritual, never intel- 
lectual. He turns the light of His talk upon what is 
central in our nature. The stronghold of the great 
Teacher of God's truth, is the spirit of man. Study His 
methods and you will find it so. Why should the Being 
who sees man's thoughts as he thinks them ; who watches 
the ebb and flow of man's emotions as they move within 
him, just as a watchmaker, when he springs open your 
chronometer, sees every movement of every wheel there ; 
who knows that when a man thinks atheism and talks 
atheism, the trouble is within ; down in his spiritual na- 
ture, and not in his brain which does the thinking, or in 
his tongue, which speaks it ; why should He take an in- 
direct method, when the direct is the shorter, and surer, 
and mightier? 

If there ever was an apostasy ; if men are out of rela- 
tions to God ; if they are alienated from Him, and have 
a way of their own, which is contrary to His way for 
them, this thing we should expect, that they would try 
not to believe in a God ; they would try to think Him 
out of the Universe. Their wish would be father to their 
thought. It is a great deal easier to believe in a God 
than not to believe in Him. It takes a mighty effort 



1 6 THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 

for a thinking man, who is honest, not to believe in God . 
I do not know of anything more natural, more in har- 
mony with our best thoughts of the best Being of whom 
we can conceive, than that He should send His Son here 
to show us how we may be forgiven ; and how we ought 
to live ; to reveal to us a hereafter. Given the facts of 
Revelation as to God and to man, I think the most 
natural thing in the world, is the Incarnation and all 
that belongs to it. I remember that Professor Park, of 
Andover, used to say of the Atonement, that if Socrates 
could have known of it, he would have rushed to his dis- 
ciples with the words : Eureka ! Eureka ! I have found 
it ! I have found it ! 

Backsliding and apostasy from God inevitably affect a 
man's belief. Because, what a man believes to be true, if 
he is honest, he applies to himself. If it is true that only the 
pure in heart can see God, it is also true, that only the 
pure in heart want to believe in a God. I mean, in the 
God of the Bible ; a Being, omniscient, omnipresent, and 
who will bring into account every deed done here in the 
body. I have seen it illustrated over aiid over again : the 
way in which apostasy from God in the heart produces 
apostasy in belief. Here, for example, is a young minister 
with every gift and grace for his office. He gets an 
auspicious settlement. For years, he is successful and 
useful. By and by, he begins to avoid preaching some 
of the fundamental truths of the Bible ; then, it is whis- 
pered around among his brethren, that in his own secret 
bosom he does not believe them. Then, finally, under 
some sort of a cloud, he quietly withdraws from the work 
of the ministry, and in due time, passes away from this 
world to his account. To you, who knew him in his 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 1 7 

earlier days ; who saw what there was in his best possi- 
bilities, this has always been a mystery. But to those 
who know that from the very first of his career, he prac- 
ticed the vice of taking alcoholic stimulants ; that he 
depended upon them in his studies, and in his public 
labors ; it has all been clear enough. And let any public 
teacher begin to abate from this truth, and to shade off 
from that, and to reject a third, and nine cases in ten, 
you will find that there is some reason in his own heart 
and life which makes denial of these doctrines congenial 
to him. I think if the Psalmist had written a psalm 
during the time of the slumber of his conscience in sin, 
it would hardly have begun with the lines : " O Lord, 
thou hast searched me and known me even if he never 
indulged in the thought that, perhaps, there were " no 
God !" 

IV. Atheism of the heart is to be cured in the heart, 
and not in the head. A heart which denies that there is 
a God, cannot be cured by arguments addressed to the 
head. The heart keeps on arguing, after the head is van- 
quished. Goldsmith's schoolmaster was like the heart of 
many a man of modern times. 

" In arguing, too, the parson owned his skill, 
For, e'en though vanquished, he could argue still." 

The other day, when Joseph Cook was asked how to 
deal with a skeptic, his answer was, " Pray with him." It 
was not a new idea ; but there is great wisdom in it. It 
is not merely the value of the prayer, as a request prof- 
fered and answered, that enters into the case. There is 
a God ; and that God has written His name : " I am that 
lam!" on the tablets of that young man's spirit. Prayer 
will help him to read it there. If you can pray, as you 



1 8 THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 

ought, he will feel the sense of God's presence. As a 
Creator, the being of God is not self-evidencing. We 
are made so, that it is natural for us to infer it. But as a 
Father, as the Father of our spirits, the being of a God 
is self-evidencing. The spirit of man cannot be brought 
face to face with the Spirit of God, without the child's 
recognizing God's fatherhood. If a man will listen to 
the crying out of his own soul for a Father ; if a man 
will listen to the voices within him, which speak to him 
of moral perfection ; vvhich speak of rewards and punish- 
ments ; if a man will open his spirit to God as a Spirit, 
he will surely cry, "Abba, Father !" 

The reading of books addressed to the intellect, will 
always be helpful to sincere minds, anxious to know the 
intellectual arguments which are urged for the truth. But, 
if a man is conscious in his inmost soul, that if there be 
a God, he is bound, instantly, to become a different man ; 
to think different thoughts ; to have different motives ; to 
cleanse his heart of what evil things the Lord Jesus says 
proceed from the heart, and he is not willing to make a 
sincere effort to secure these spiritual conditions, all the 
arguments in the world will not convince him. There is 
no argument in the Universe, to convince an atheist in 
the head who is also an atheist in the heart. In the 
treatment of atheism of the heart, we are to remember 
God's own description of it : " That it is deceitful above 
all things, and desperately wicked." The atheist deceives 
himself. He comes to you, and tells you how he deplores 
the necessity which is on him, of withdrawing from 
Christian ordinances and from Christian people. He re- 
gards it a great sacrifice, but honesty and manliness compel 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 



I 9 



him to make it. But he has ceased to believe in such 
things. Why, honesty and manliness would lead him to 
seek in his own spirit those conditions which were never 
fulfilled by a creature of God without God's so proving 
Himself to His spirit, that he was compelled to cry out 
with Thomas: "My Lord, and my God!" Do you 
think that God would ever prove Himself to a man's 
spirit, while that man was a profane man, a blasphemous 
man, an impure man, an intemperate man, a dishonest 
man, a prayerless and godless man ? Only he can know 
God, who would be like Him. 

In a recent sermon on Being Alone With God, George 
Macdonald has said : " The tumult of the day goes by, 
the pleasures of the evening pass, the ' good night ' is 
said ; as if we were preparing for our grave, we lay aside 
our garments in which we do the work of the day ; we 
lay ourselves out straight in the bed, and there we lie ; 
and God spreads the curtains of darkness around us, just 
that He may shut Himself in with His child. It is God 
and His child then ; or God, and somebody else." But, 
it is just so in the hours of the day : It is God and His 
child ; or God and somebody else. It is so all along 
through life. It is God and His child, or God and 
somebody else. And when death's night actually comes, 
and that which Macdonald so graphically describes as 
happening to us daily, happens to us for the last time ; 
and what we have so often done for ourselves, other 
hands do for us ; nay, only for what is left of us here : 
it will still be God and His child, or God and somebody 
else, as we go forth to unknown worlds. What the wise 
man has said in his head, what the fool has said in his 
heart will make no difference then. 



THE ATHEISM OF THE HEART. 



No God ? All Nature shudders at the word ! 
For by His pulse, her every pulse is stirred ; 
From central heait of fire, to peopled rim, 
She breathes, and moves, and has her life in Him. 

No God ? His might upholds the mountains high, 
That shoulder, Atlas-like, the vaulted sky ; 
No God ? His kisses are the morning dew, 
With which He greets the earth, each day, anew. 

No God ? His glance is in the mid-day beam, 
Which kindles bright the ripples of the stream ; 
His great heart throbs in Ocean's solemn tide, 
Where mighty navies, like child's playthings, ride. 

No God ? His breath is in the twilight breeze ; 
As once in Eden, walks He mid the trees ; 
The daisy, starring there earth's humblest sod ; 
The singing bird, alike are thoughts of God. 

No God ? The worlds on worlds above grow pale 
He kindled each ; what if His light should fail ? 
No God ? He calls them up the azure arch ; 
Around His throne, they make eternal march. 

No God ? And thou so marvelously made ? 
God's wisdom, love and skill, in all displayed ? 
Each perfect part, ah ! and the perfect whole ; 
No God ? And, yet, God's temple is thy soul ? 
No God ? No God ? What fate, alas, shall be, 
No God ? Poor, wretched fool, at length for thee ; 
His inward law defaced, defied, o'er grown, 
Launched forth to meet this God denied alone ? 



II. 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 

John xiv: 8, 9. — "Philip saith unto Him, show us the Father, 
and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long 
time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip ? He that 
hath seen me, hath seen the Father. And how sayest thou, then, 
show us the Father?" 

There are those who try to make themselves believe 
that the moral greatness ; that the supernatural attributes 
and works ; what they are pleased to call the pretensions 
of the Man Christ Jesus, were an after thought of His 
disciples ; like the after glow of the sun when it has set ; 
that they came to be believed, only after He was no 
longer in the world ; that He never had any such con- 
ception of Himself*; that He never made any such claims 
for Himself. Just the contrary of this is true. Though 
He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, 
and the world knew Him not ; though " He came unto 
His own, and His own received Him not yet His dis- 
ciples never set a higher value upon Him after His 
death, than He did upon Himself while living. They 
came slowly to understand the dimensions of His words. 
Death indeed interpreted many things which He had 
spoken. Death always does. Christ's death was the key 
to His life ; no man can understand His life, without 
looking at it in the light of His death. 



22 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



The thing that Philip wanted, is the thing that we all 
want. We want the Father. We want to be shown the 
Father. That sufficeth us, and nothing else does. And 
here is where all human religions fail. They do not 
show us the Father ; they can not show us the Father. 
The Father is not in them. The Father can not be found 
there. Brahmanism is a vast spiritual pantheism ; God 
in all spirit, and yet God nowhere to be found. It finds 
nothing but God in the Universe. But He can not be 
worshipped because He is unknown. The moment we 
think we know Him, we have proof we know Him not. 
The only God of Buddhism is a man who has passed 
through endless transmigrations until he has reached the 
throne of the Universe ; and we never can follow him 
unless we think ourselves into thought-dust ; into non- 
entity, nothingness. In Confucianism a personal God 
is unknown. Worship is directed not to God, but to an- 
tiquity, to ancestors ; to the dead, who have gone down 
into silence. In the Zend Avesta of the Persians, we 
have two gods engaged in an irrepressible conflict, like 
light and darkness in the world of Nature. And so we 
might go through the whole list, Egyptian, Grecian, Ro- 
man. In no religion of man can we find God the Father. 
But this Jesus of Nazareth says, " He that hath seen me, 
hath seen the Father." He is not only found, He is re- 
vealed ; He is not only revealed, He is seen of men. 

It is this 

REVELATION OF THE FATHER 

which Christ claims that He makes ; nay, better, that He 
is, which I want you to study with me this morning. 

I. I want to call your attention to this idea of father- 
hood in God. It is the Christian idea. God is the 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



23 



Father of man's spirit. How unlike the pagan idea of 
climbing up ? God made man's body out of the dust ; 
but He gave him a spiritual nature from His own. The 
first function was a creative one. The second was crea- 
tive and paternal in one ! When He breathed into man's 
nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul, 
God exercised toward man's spirit the paternal function. 
This is the very essence of fatherhood ; to create a being 
in one's own likeness. We talk about the figurative lan- 
guage of the Bible. We talk about the anthropological 
methods of the Bible. But really, the Bible uses language 
literally, and we use it figuratively. The things of the 
Bible are the real things, and we compare them to things 
which are only shadows. The Saviour teaches us to pray, 
" Our Father which art in Heaven." Who ever had a 
father on earth who deserved to be called father as God 
does ? God's fatherhood of man is the archetype ; and 
the fatherhood of us who are fathers on earth, is the type. 
Jesus says of Himself, "I am that Bread of Life ; I am that 
Bread which came down from Heaven." Which bread 
is the best entitled to be the archetype, the bread which 
is for the body ; the bread which perisheth, for the body 
which perisheth, or the living Bread which feeds the 
deathless image of God ? Well might Jesus say, " I am 
that Bread of Life." As compared with Him, what is 
this that we call the staff of life, on which we lean for 
three score years and ten ? There is a staff of life on 
which the soul may lean forever. 

The trouble with us in looking at spirritual things is, 
that we guage everything from the earth. We impart all 
the imperfections of our fatherhood to the fatherhood of 
God, and then say : " This is the true fatherhood ; this 



/ 



24 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



is the archetype. God will feel so, and so ; God will do 
so, and so ; because He is a Father, as we are fathers." 
God's fatherhood is perfect, and our fatherhood is imper- 
fect. Whatever we see to be the fatherhood of God, that 
ought our fatherhood to be. What our fatherhood is, is 
no exact prophecy as to the fatherhood of God. I 
mean by this, that we can understand God not by bring- 
ing His fatherhood down to the level of our fatherhood ; 
but by making our fatherhood a suggestion, an intima- 
tion, a hint as to what God's fatherhood is ; remembering 
always, that He is infinite, and we are finite ; that He is 
perfect, and we are imperfect ; that He is holy and we 
are sinful. There are a great many people who are not 
filial to God's fatherhood, and therefore not in sympathy 
with it ; who want to deduce that fatherhood from their 
own. Things must be equal to the same things before 
they can be equal to each other. You must be like God, 
before your fatherhood can be like God's fatherhood. 

One of the most touching things in human fatherhood 
is the sense of inadequacy to all the wants which our 
children need to have supplied. We can feed them, and 
clothe them. We can teach them to speak and to walk. 
We can not meet all the demands of fatherhood to them. 
We are very imperfect patterns of fatherhood. We all 
have to tell our children, like the crawfish in the fable, 
not to walk as we walk. They are sick ; the flush comes 
to their little cheeks ; their little lips parch for want of 
inward, not outward moisture ; there is such furnace heat 
within them ; they wilt like little rose-buds ; they die. 
How often they look up imploringly to us for relief. We 
have no relief for them. We want to save them, but we 
can not. They grow up to be young men ; some infernal 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



25 



appetite gets possession of them ; fed by these licensed 
drinking -places out of which this Government gets one 
fifth of its revenue. Once our streets were red with the 
blood of the slave ; so red, that only blood could wash it 
out ; now they are red with the blood of the drunkard, 
1 and drunkard's wives and widows. We want to save 
them, but we can not. We are so limited in our powers ; 
we are so involved in their weaknesses and miseries our- 
selves. Our fatherhood is a fatherhood of weaknesses 
and limitations ; of time and sense ; God's fatherhood is 
a fatherhood of the spirit ; has to do with shaping and 
moulding the spirit into His own likeness ; and has to 
do with the world where the spirit has its eternal home. 

People sometimes want to know why, if the Bible is 
inspired, it does not reveal material truth, as well as 
moral and spiritual. It is answer enough, to say, that if 
material truth had been revealed, it would have resulted 
in the mental stagnation ; in dwarfing the intellect, and 
retarding the progress of the human family. God sharp- 
ens the wits of His creatures on His problems in Nature ; 
just as we sharpen a knife on a stone. This theory of 
evolution is only another whetstone. Besides, material 
truth can be discovered ; moral and spiritual truth except 
so far as witnessed to us within, which is revelation, has 
to be revealed. And only the pure in heart can find it 
then. But the answer most appropriate in this connec- 
tion, is this: Man may know all material truth and not 
recognize and be loyal to God's fatherhood; be just as 
much in the Arctic exile of unbelief, as though he knew 
nothing. For, knowing all material truth and not know- 
ing God's fatherhood, he knows nothing yet as he ought 
to know it. God's fatherhood to him is the great secret 



26 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



of the Universe. It is the science of all sciences. There- 
fore God has undertaken to make a revelation of this 
fatherhood in Jesus Christ His Son. And when humanity 
has recognized this secret, it will be prepared to put all 
things under its feet. 

You remember those beautiful lines of Whittier, ''The 
Prayer of Agassiz," at the opening of his scientific school 
on the island of Pennikese. After describing the scene 
and the circumstances the Poet goes on : 

" Said the master to the youth : We have come in search of truth ; 
Trying with uncertain keys, door by door of mysteries ; 
We are reaching through His laws, to the garment-hem of Cause : 
Him, the endless, unbegun, the unnamable, the one 
Light of all our light the source ; life of life, and force of force : 
As with fingers of the blind, we are groping here to find 
What the hieroglyphics mean of the unseen in the seen ; 
What the thought which underlies Nature's masking and disguise ; 
What it is, that hides beneath blight and bloom, and birth and 
death ; 

By past efforts unavailing, doubt and error, loss and failing, 
Of our weakness made aware; on the threshhold of our task, 
Let us light and guidance ask ; let us pause in silent prayer." 

Do you know that I think that to have discovered that 
God is, and that He can answer prayer ; that His secret is 
with them that fear Him ; and that in the study of ma- 
terial truth, the truest scientist is ready to put his hand 
into the hand of God, and say, "Father, lead on !" is a 
thing of greater dignity and worth ; a thing more ac- 
ceptable to the Father of his spirit, than the richest sci- 
entific results of this man's magnificent life? What 
Longfellow wrote on his fiftieth birthday, has been the 
key of all his scientific studies : 

" It was fifty years ago, in the pleasant month of May, 
In the beautiful Pays de Vaud, a child in its cradle lay. 
And Nature, the old nurse, took the child upon her knee, 



S 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



2 7 



Saying, ' Here is a story book, thy Father has written for thee.' 
• Come wander with me,' she said, ' into regions yet untrod, 
And read wha* is still yet unread in the manuscript of God.' " 

The Bible holds steadfast to one idea : The revelation 
of God's fatherhood to the spirit of man ; to man in his 
essential part. Said the Saviour, before leaving His dis- 
ciples : " I will not leave you comfortless." It might 
have been translated, " I will not leave you orphans:" 
that is, comfortless, as to the fatherhood of God, for this 
is the source of all our discomfort. This is the great loss 
with the orphan ; not that he has no friend, but that he 
has no father. And this war does, and this the sale of 
intoxicating liquor does : It makes children fatherless. 
And fatherless children are children who in losing a 
father have lost the hint which they need, as to God's 
fatherhood. You remember a father do you? The 
slaveholder's rebellion did not gather your father in the 
harvest of death, where men were mowed down like the 
grass, before you had learned to prattle his name ? Your 
father has not been crushed by the whiskey Juggernaut, 
whose priests contribute one fifth' of its revenue to the 
General Government, for the privilege of making little 
boys and girls fatherless. Well, thank God for that. Do 
you remember some one, great, strong, hearty ; the man 
who earned your bread by the sweat of his brow ; the 
man who brought home to you and your brothers and 
sisters, his arms full of good things • that cheered the 
heart of your mother, into whose lap you would all climb 
up together, and nestle like birds in a nest; who was as 
tender as he was strong and true ; whose great heart all 
your successes gladdened ; who saw you grow up to 
young manhood or womanhood, with a father's pride, 



28 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



and when the time came for you to go forth to do battle 
for yourself, who amid the mingled sunshine and rain of 
his tears, sent you forth with a father's blessing and the 
blessing of Heaven ; who was always ready with his 
counsel, and sympathy, and help, until the day when a 
shock went through you as though you had been shot, 
and you heard of his death ; and you were fatherless ! 
That was your father upon earth. You sprang from his 
loins. You bear his name. If you ever are anything, or 
do anything in the world, you owe it largely to him ; it 
will be largely because you have been true to his aspira- 
tions for you. 

Now Jesus takes all these home ideas and asks you to 
transfer them to God ; to drop all that is imperfect and 
sinful, as Elijah did his earthly mantle when translated. 
What this father has been to you at his best in the lower 
sphere of time and sense, God is to you at His best in 
the higher sphere of things not seen and eternal. As to 
temporal things, your earthly father was wiser than you : 
as to spiritual things so is your Heavenly Father. This 
Bible is your Father's book. He has written here the 
wisest things, the most precious things, the sweetest 
things concerning you, which He ever thought. Open it 
anywhere, and you can see that He has never lost you 
out of His mind. If you are sinning against Him, He 
teaches you that sin is your worst enemy, and that He is 
ready to forgive you ; that you can not go on in sin 
without doing the worst thing possible for yourself; 
without putting yourself under penalty of His most right- 
eous laws ; without grieving Him to the heart, because 
you banish yourself forever from his presence and His 
love. He is all the time working to gather you to His 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



2 9 



heart as your earthly father used to do. If you have 
sought His forgiveness, how full His word is of promise 
to you ! And when you go forth to duties or dangers, 
how He covers you with his wing ! 

II. There are certain characteractics of this fatherhood 
of God, as the Saviour has revealed it, which will repay 
us for a closer analysis. 

1. I want you to notice, that it is the fatherhood of a 
spirit to a spirit. I have already suggested this : but it 
will bear unfolding. In the kingdom of Nature every- 
thing is material ; in the kingdom of God everything is 
spiritual. God is honored by the material structure of a 
creation which obeys His material laws. When He made 
this earth, He said of it, " It is very good!" And He wrote 
His autograph under it. In His spiritual kingdom He is 
honored in the same way : by the obedience of spiritual 
laws. The word by which the Lord Jesus introduced 
Himself as the revealer of the Father, was this : " Sacrifice 
and offering thou wouldst not, but a body hast thou pre- 
pared me ;" Then said I, " Lo, I Come ! (in the volume of 
the Book it is written of me,) " I delight to do thy will, 
O God." The Father, then, is a Being with a will in 
reference to His children. He has prepared a body for 
us ; earthly investiture in which we are spectacles to the 
angels. And when He finds a child of His in this earthly 
investiture who does His will, He says to him : " This is 
my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased !" He wit- 
nesses with his spirit, that he is born of God. 

People sometimes come to a minister in trouble of 
mind, and say, " they want to become Christians ; they 
know they never can be happy, unless they are Chris- 
tians." Probe them a little, and you will find their pres- 



3° 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



ent uneasiness arises from the consciousness that they are 
about to do something wrong. They want to become 
Christians to get rid of their wretchedness ; but they do 
not want to give up the wrong thing that makes them 
wretched. It is like taking a dead watch to a jeweller 
and telling him to put it in good running order with- 
out taking it to pieces and cleaning it. People go to the 
doctor, and say, "Get me well; but I must have my 
brandy every day, or my tobacco every day." Just so, 
they come to the minister, saying, " Make me a Chris- 
tian, but I must do this thing, or that thing, which I know 
to be a dishonor to myself and a dishonor to God." 
There is no power in the Universe that can make such a 
person a Christian. As Christ has revealed Him, God 
is a spirit, and a Christian is one who has the spirit of 
Christ with reference to God's will ; who says to the 
Father : 1 'Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not. But 
a body hast thou prepared me ;" and who adds, "Lo, I 
come! I delight to do thy will, O God;" in a word, 
who uses this life as a convenience, an opportunity to do 
the will of God. 

Says Carlyle in his Essay on Voltaire : "It is a high, 
solemn, almost awful thought for every individual man, 
that his earthly influence which has had a commence- 
ment, will never through all ages, were he the very 
meanest of us, have an end ! What is done, is done ■ 
and has already blended itself with the boundless, ever- 
living, everworking Universe ; and will also, work there, 
for good or for evil, openly or secretly throughout all 
time. But the life of every man is as the well-spring of 
a stream, whose small beginnings are indeed, plain to 
all, but whose ulterior course and destination, as it winds 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 3 1 

through the expanses of infinite years, only the Omnis- 
cient can discern. Will it mingle with neighboring rivu- 
lets, as a tributary, or receive them as a sovereign ? Is 
it to be a nameless brook, and will its tiny waters, among 
millions of other brooks and rills increase the current of 
some world -river? Or, is it to be itself a Rhene or a 
Danau, whose goings forth are to the uttermost lands, its 
flood an everlasting boundary-line on the globe itself; 
the bulwark and highway of whole kingdoms and conti- 
nents ? We know not. Only, in either case, we know 
its path is to the great ocean ; its waters, were they but 
a handful, are here ; and can not be annihilated, or per- 
mently held back. As little can we prognosticate with 
any certainty the future influences from the present as- 
pects of an individual. What was it to the Pharaohs of 
Egypt in that old era, if Jethro the Midianitish priest 
and grazier accepted the Hebrew outlaw as his herds- 
man ? Yet the Pharaohs, with all their chariots of war 
are buried deep in the wrecks of time ; and that Moses 
still lives, not among his own tribe only, but in the hearts 
and daily business of all civilized nations. Nay, to take 
an infinitely higher instance ; who has ever forgotten 
those lines of Tacitus, inserted as a small transitory, alto- 
gether trifling circumstance in the history of such a po- 
tentate as Nero ? To us, it is the most earnest, sad and 
sternly significant passage that we know to exist in writ- 
ing : "To quiet this rumor — that he had fired the city 
himself — Nero charged with the crime and punished with 
the most unheard of severities, that class, hated for their 
general wickedness, whom the vulgar call Christian. 
The originator of that name was one Christ, who in the 
reign of Tiberius, suffered death by sentence of the Pro- 



• 



s 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



curator, Pontius Pilate. The baneful superstition thereby 
repressed for a time, again broke out, not only over Ju- 
dea, the native soil of that mischief, but in the city also, 
where from every side all atrocious and abominable 
things collect and flourish. Tacitus was the wisest, most 
penetrating man of his generation ; and to such depth, 
and no deeper, had he seen into this transaction ; the 
most important that has occurred, or can occur in the 
annals of mankind." 

The will of God, so far as His creatures are concerned, 
relates to character ; relates to the purpose, the motive. 
The outward vocation which a man chooses, is a sec- 
ondary thing, provided that in it, he seeks to do the will 
of God. Nero might have been a Christian, and so might 
Pontius Pilate. " God is a Spirit, and they that worship 
Him, must worship Him in spirit and in truth." It is 
just as true of service, as of worship. And when God 
says " Let us make a new creature on the earth ; let us 
introduce a new individual ; the thing for such a crea- 
ture to do, is to put himself into spiritual communica- 
tion with God, by asking the question, " Lord what wilt 
thou have me to do ?" Thus his life becomes spiritual ; 
not a mere outward thing, which when you have seen the 
outside, you know the whole of it. But a life in which 
pulses the heart-beat of the Father, because we seek to do 
His will among men. I do not regard that spiritual 
merely, which relates to prayer and worship. Prayer 
and worship help us to spirituality of life. We need 
them for spirituality of life. Moses was told to put his 
shoes off his feet, in presence ot the burning bush, be- 
cause it was holy ground. It is holy ground everywhere. 
It is holy ground in your nursery, my Christian sister. 



* 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



33 



" Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings has God per- 
fected praise." It is holy ground where we break our 
daily bread in presence of our children. It is holy 
ground, the pathway we take to our daily business. It 
is holy ground in your grocery store. It may be like the 
walk to Emmaus. It is holy ground wherever one who 
is the temple of the Holy Ghost may journey or abide. 
And whatever he does, he may make holy service. As 
George Herbert quaintly expresses it : 

" Teach me, my God and king, in all things thee to see : 
And what I do in anything, to do it as for thee. 
All may of thee partake ; nothing can be so mean 
Which with this tincture, for thy sake, will not grow bright and 
clean. 

A servant with this clause, makes drudgery divine : 

Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, makes that and the action fine." 

If God's fatherhood is spiritual, our sonship must also 
be spiritual. A father who is a Spirit, will find His 
lineaments in the spirits of His sons. If we have no 
spiritual likeness to God, we have no likeness worthy of 
the name. I know it is the fashion of these days to trace 
every mental and spiritual process to the animal nature ; 
and so to drive God out of His peculiar kingdom. But, 
I claim, that God wants us to use this material structure 
in which we walk about ; this world, in which we find 
ourselves ; our powers of speech and action ; our accom- 
plishments and accumulations ; all that is outward ; as 
the expression of that which is inward ; and that only so 
far forth, as it is this expression, as it is spiritual, is it 
real in His sight. 

2. I want you to notice, that as Jesus Christ has revealed 
the fatherhood of God, it is a fatherhood of truth. It is 
spiritual ; it is inward ; but it is, also truthful. If you do 



34 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



not know the truth about a thing, you do not know any- 
thing about it. 

Did you ever think of it, that truth is the light of the 
moral world ? is the medium, and the only medium, in 
which we can see moral and spiritual things at all. Specu- 
lation gives no more light than a firefly. This moment, 
you think you have him, and the next moment, he is 
elsewhere. These men, who think they have some new 
light, which the Bible has not given, remind me of a boy 
with a firefly under a tumbler. You can not see his light, 
unless you put out all other light. And, when you wake 
up in the morning, and look at your prisoner, he is dead. 
The Saviour says of Himself, as the revealer of the Father : 
"I am the Light of the world !" The eye is the organ, 
by which we avail ourselves of the natural light of the 
world ; but, the eye is not the light, and cannot furnish 
the light ; and can see, only in the light which God 
furnishes. We have a spiritual organ, which corre- 
sponds to the eye ; but, it furnishes no light. It 
can see in God's light. All God's children see in His 
light. They love His truth ; they believe in His truth j 
they proclaim His truth. They are not, all the time, 
trying to prove His truth, untrue. The Saviour has 
Himself applied this test : " Every one that doeth 
evil, hateth the light ; neither cometh to the light ; lest 
his deeds should be reproved. But, he that doeth truth, 
cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made* manifest 
that they are wrought in God." By light here, He means 
moral and spiritual truth. Truth, like light, not only 
reveals things ; but reveals them in their relations. In- 
deed, knowing the relations of things, is the only way to 
know the things themselves. You get up suddenly in the 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



35 



night. In your half-awake bewilderment, your hands 
strike against the door. There are three doors in the 
room. Which door is it ? Unless you know which door 
it is, you cannot know where you are. The door may 
lead you into a wardrobe ; into another room, upon the 
same level • or to the head of a stairway. It is not 
enough to know that you are at a door. Which door is 
it ? You must know things in their relations, or you do 
not know them. 

When Jesus comes here to reveal the Father, He comes 
to let in light upon your relations to the Father, and my 
relations to the Father. To tell me that there is an infi- 
nite Being, who is the Father of my spirit ; and that He 
would have me love Him ; does not reveal Him ; unless 
I am also told His estimate of my relation to Him. The 
fatherhood of God is full of blessedness and promise, to 
the spirit that is filial. Fatherhood and sonship are com- 
plements : loving fatherhood, obedient sonship. I may 
stand, you may stand in the shadow of God's love : for, 
all true love casts a shadow. If love approves, by the same 
law it disapproves. When the sun is rising-, it casts 
shadows westward ; when it is setting, it casts shadows 
eastward. Falling on the very same objects, it casts 
shadows in opposite directions, because they have changed 
their relation to the sun. The sun has not changed. 
The earth has wheeled another half of her portion toward 
the sun, that it may be warmed in his rays. You remem- 
ber what the Apostle James says about " the Father of 
lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of 
turning." If it were possible for a man to keep changing 
his position on the earth, so that it should always be night 
where he was, it would be no fault of the sun. His dark- 



56 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



ness would be because he was out of relations to the sun. 
If a man has not a recognition of God's fatherhood ; it 
is because he is out of relations to God's fatherhood. 

Jesus Christ reveals the Father in the light of His own 
earthly walk toward the Father. Let me know what 
kind of a son you have ; and whether he please or dis- 
please you, I know you, from that son. Again and again, 
came the voice of God from the silences of Eternity : 
"This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." 
And Jesus claimed for Himself, that He did always the 
things that pleased the Father. Now, if such a life as 
Jesus led here, pleases God, we know what kind of a 
Being God is, as a Father. " He that hath seen me, hath 
seen the Father." The fatherhood of God, as Jesus 
revealed it, is a fatherhood of truth. 

Truth and sentiment are often two very different 
things : two very contrary and inconsistent things. Let 
us suppose, you have that great grief and burden and 
shame, that comes to the father of a son who is a slave to 
the habit of strong drink. Or let us suppose, my Chris- 
tian sister, that such a man is your husband, and the 
father of your children. Do you know the difference 
between sentiment and truth? In the moments of his 
repentance, this man will lavish upon you all the endear- 
ments in the vocabulary. He is the most affectionate 
son ; he is the most affectionate husband, in the whole 
human family. And, you ? Why, your nature is angelic. 
This is sentiment. It is the tinselry of speech. Ah ! if 
he loved you in truth, one tenthousandth part as much 
as he loves you in words, he would sooner pluck out his 
right eye, than grieve you again ; he would sooner cut 
off his right arm ! God wants truth, not sentiment ; 
God wants deeds, not words. 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



37 



We read in the Bible, that God dwells in light unap- 
proachable, and full of glory. It is the light of truth. 
•You know the fable of the housewife and the sun. She 
called the sun a filthy thing, because it revealed the kind 
of house-keeper she was. That is the trouble that many 
people have with God, as the Father of lights ; as Jesus 
here reveals Him. There is not a man or woman living 
upon the face of the earth to-day, who, if willing to see 
themselves as God sees them, would not flee to his arms 
with the cry, " Father! Father!" They are flattering 
themselves, that God is too much like a weak, easy-going 
earthly father, to punish them : that sin is a kind of nega- 
tive good, of which since God can bring good out of it, 
He will not call them to a very strict account ! How 
about this Man Christ Jesus? Is this the kind of a 
Father, revealed by His sonship ? 

3. I want you to notice, that as Jesus Christ revealed 
the fatherhood of God, it is a fatherhood of love. 
"God is a spirit;" "God is light ;" yes, and "God is 
love!" 

God, as a Father, loves us in our likeness to Himself. 
He cannot love us in any other way. " God so loved the 
world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoso- 
ever believeth in Him, should not perish, but have ever- 
lasting life." This is Christ's own statement of God's 
love. Faith in Jesus Christ, makes a new creature ; fills 
this world with new creatures. That is an object worthy 
of the movement of God's heart of infinite love. Do 
you think that God's fatherhood leads Him to love you 
in your sinfulness ? Dare you impute such love to Him ? 
There is only one sinner in the world, that you love in 
his sins, and that is yourself. Every other person in the 



38 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



world, you love for what in him seems to be lovely. 
That would be contrary to the truth of His nature. That 
would be contrary to the spirituality of His nature. 
That would be contrary to the love of His nature. He 
can not love that which is not lovely. He can not love 
that in another/ which would be unlovely in Himself; 
which would have been unlovely in His Son, who came 
here to reveal Him ; who did reveal Him. God loves us 
in spite of our sins. God loves in us, that which it is 
possible for us to be, in His Son, when redeemed from 
our sins. 

We make the same havoc of the meaning of this word 
love, that we do of the word fatherhood. The word love 
with us, is something which shades orT into weakness. I 
had almost said, that what we regard the aureola, the 
glory of human love, is weakness. How many a father 
there is, whose son would have been a great deal better 
off, not if he had loved him less, but if he had loved 
him more as God loves us : loved only what was best in 
him ! David never would have cried out of the depths 
of a father's broken heart : " Would to God I had died 
for thee, O Absalom, my son !" if he had loved in Absa- 
lom only that which God loved in him. David had a 
sentimental love for Absalom. He was proud of him, 
faults and all ; sins and all ! True, parental love, love 
that is worthy of the name of fatherhood, is love which 
approves only that which is worthy of approval. 

Many a time, has a father thought, as, taking the 
mother's place, he has put his little son to bed at night- 
fall, hearing him recite his little prayer, of all the noble 
possibilities in his nature ; when this filial, reverent spirit, 
so touching in its simplicity, shall have matured, and 



REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 



39 



developed into true manhood ; shall have been transferred 
to the Fatherhood of God. He looks at his own dis- 
jointed and inconstant life, and says to himself in prayer : 
" God grant that these little feet may never be such wan- 
derers from Him as my feet have been ! God grant that 
what I now see, He intended me to be, may be realized 
in my son." These are truthful moments ; spiritual 
moments; loving moments. Here is a fatherhood at its 
best ; like the Fatherhood of God. In that twilight hour, 
this father wants nothing for his son but what God wants ; 
approves nothing in his son, but what God approves. 
This is love ; not sentiment. 

I want to dwell a little longer here, because here is 
where a great many people deceive themselves. They 
are counting upon God's love ; but God's love has 
expressed itself. Shall I not say God's love has done its 
utmost? The love of God is a love which spares not 
itself ; a love which gives itself up for the sake of the 
lost. God has put His love into a fact ; into the fact 
which reveals it. It has done a deed, at which all the 
ages wonder ; at which all the ages in Eternity will won- 
der. The difference between love as a sentiment, and 
love as a principle, is precisely here. Love as a sentiment 
is never done with words. It talks, it sings, it preaches, 
it prays. Love, as a principle, is not satisfied with words. 
It must do something, sacrifice something, to express 
itself. It must put itself on record in a deed. It must 
give itself, if it can. Now, God has given Himself, to 
show His love ; to reveal His Fatherhood. It is not to 
put us upon a basis, where we can have a good time in 
this world ; to give us encouragement, that however we 
may live, because we have confessed Him here, it is to be 



40 REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 

all right with us, hereafter. God wants His likeness in 
us. He wants Jesus Christ formed there, the hope ot 
glory. This fatherhood of His, demands correspondence 
in our sonship : and it secures it, too. Ah ! this father- 
hood is the motive and encouragement to sonship. Such 
a Father as God is, deserves such a Son as our Elder 
Brother ; such sons, as because of love to Him, are trans- 
formed into His likeness, and will be, at last, translated 
into His Kingdom. 

Thou dost not know thy Father, God ? 
Senseless of Him, as some cold clod ? 
And this the issue of thy quest, 
With Christ, so long thy Friend and Guest ? 
Show us the Father ? What dost mean ? 
In Him, thou hast the Father seen. 

The words He spake, the deeds He did, 
In them, the Father's love was hid ; 
In Him, the Babe of woman born ; 
In Him, the Martyr crowned with thorn ; 
In Him, love's dying Sacrifice ; 
Thus does thy question get replies. 

Godlike it was, to seek the earth ; 
Godlike, His humble name and birth : 
Godlike it was to stoop and die ; 
Godlike His love's last agony ; 
Enigma still is God to thee ? 
In Christ, His Son, thou hast the key. 

Earth's hieroglyphics, thou may'st spell ; 
Dumb as a sphynx, she cannot tell. 
She wheels in space, her little hour ; 
She knows His Godhead and His pow'r : 
Beneath the cross; when thou hast stood, 
There hast thou seen God's Fatherhood. 



nr. 



THE GOSPEL AFTER MAN, AND THE 
GOSPEL AFTER GOD. 

Gal. i : ii and 12. — "I certify you, brethren, that the Gospel 
which was preached of me, was not after man ; for, I neither 
received it of man, neither was I taught it ; but, by the revelation 
of Jesus Christ." 

There is no sacred writer, who is more careful to dis- 
claim having any Gospel of his own, than the Apostle 
Paul. He is an ambassador of God, with God's overtures 
to deliver ; nothing more, nothing less. Holding the 
same relation to the New Dispensation, that Moses did to 
the Old ; as great, in a greater kingdom ; the moulding 
human mind here, as Moses there ; being the most logical 
of all the sacred penmen • being the mightiest and most 
original, there is no one of them who is more careful to 
attribute his authority directly to God ; his scheme of 
salvation, the good news he preaches and teaches, directly 
to God. If he is careful that every epistle shall have his 
own sign-manual, his own signature, as an Apostle ; he is 
no less careful, that men whom he addresses shall bear in 
mind, that though there be one woe hanging over him, if 
he preach not the Gospel, there is another woe hanging 
over him, if he preach any other Gospel than that which 
has been communicated to him from Heaven. These are 
his words in the 8th verse of this chapter : " Though we, 



42 



THE GOSPEL AFTER MAN, 



or an angel from Heaven preach any other Gospel unto 
you, than that we have preached unto you, let him be 
anathema ; let him be accursed !" This is not an anathema 
such as men deal out against each other ; an ecclesiastical 
excommunication, with bells and candles. It is one and 
the same, with that anathema employed in Revelation : 
" If any man take away from the words of the book of 
this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the 
Book of Life; and out of the holy city; and out of the 
things that are written in this book." 

Handling the Word of God deceitfully, is the most 
fearful thing that a man can do ; putting things into the 
Word of God which are not there ; taking things out of 
the Word of God that have been written there by God's 
finger, and sealed with the blood of the Lamb ; think of 
the consequences to those who are misled and betrayed. 
If a man preaches what God teaches, God takes the con- 
sequences. If he does not, he himself takes the conse- 
quences. The Psalmist says, " If I forget thee, O Jeru- 
salem, let my right hand forget her cunning, and let my 
tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth." A man may 
well say this about the Gospel. There is a cheap way of 
getting men's ears and men's plaudits, by foisting into 
one's preaching, that which God has not put into His 
message. Did I say cheap? Let us await the Judgment 
of the great Day. There are some, who will be permitted 
to say, " Here am I, and these children of the Lord, 
whom thou hast given me." Think of the destiny of 
those who must say, " Here am I, and those whom I have 
betrayed into believing a lie ; to whom I have preached 
a Gospel which was not the Gospel ; to whom I have 
held out expectations, never to be realized. 



AND THE GOSPEL AFTER GOD. 



45 



The subject which I shall discuss this morning, is 

THE GOSPEL AFTER MAN, AND THE GOSPEL AFTER GOD. 

I. If there is a God ; if God is a reality ; a being with 
intelligence and affections ; the presumption is, that He 
will communicate with man, His creature, in man's own 
language. If there is a God, the Gospel in a book is a 
necessary presumption. And there is a sense in which it 
will be a Gospel after man. The Bible, like the Man 
Christ Jesus, has a two -fold nature. 

The Bible teaches us that there was a time, when man 
found God's power and godhead in the language of 
Nature ; and that they are lodged there now. But, in 
falling from God, man has lost the key to this language. 
And, therefore, God is not contented with this talking to 
His creatures in hieroglyphics. He determined to come 
nearer, and speak with a voice ; a human voice. Coler- 
idge, indeed, in his hymn, written before sunrise, in the 
valley of Chamouni, looking at Mt. Blanc, writes, 

" O dread and silent Mount ! I gazed upon thee, 
Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, 
Didst vanish from my thought ; entranced in prayer, 
I worshipped the Invisible alone !" 

He looked through Nature, up to Nature's God. He 
had recovered Nature's lost key. It was as though he 
knelt upon Mt. Blanc as an altar. The Egyptian hiero- 
glyph for night, was a star, attached by a thread to the 
ceiling of a room. There was the firmament, and there, 
a pendant, as in the ear of the Night, was the star. 
Could there be a material hieroglyph for the power and 
godhead of the Creator, more appropriate than Mt. Blanc 
himself: with his distant snow-white presence ; with his 



44 



THE GOSPEL AFTER MAN, 



eternal brow, radiant with the bloom of the sun's rising 
and setting, and circled with midnight's coronal of stars ; 
with the thunder pealing, and the lightnings playing 
around his head ; with his mantle of pine-forests, black 
as night ; and with the voice of his many waters, which 
kiss his feet, go down to gladden the meadows, far, 
far below? The Greeks made Mt. Olympus the seat 
of the court of their Gods ; and it was on Mt. Sinai that 
Moses met Jehovah. If man had never apostatized from 
God ; had never bedimmed the vision of His soul, a great 
Mountain would have been to him like a Gospel ; like an 
Altar. Perhaps, the language of Nature would have been 
enough ; he would have heard God walking in Nature, as 
Adam and Eve did in Eden. Now, it is not enough ; for, 
heathenism is often the rankest where the scenery is most 
brilliant and sublime. Where the Himalayas tower, 
where the Ganges rolls, that is her central seat. 

The metaphysical poet, Coleridge, finds God in Nature's 
majestic forms ; the Cornlaw Rhymer, Elliot, finds Him 
in the most minute ; in the insect life of English lanes : 

" What forests tall of tiniest moss, clothe every little stone ! 
What pigmy oaks their foliage toss o'er pigmy valleys lone ! 
With shade o'er shade, from ledge to ledge, ambitious of the sky, 
They feather o'er the steepest edge of mountains, mushrooms high. 

0 God of marvels ! who can tell what myriad living things 

On these grey stones unseen may dwell — what nations, with their 
kings. 

1 feel no shock, I hear no groan, while fate perchance o'erwhelms 
Empires in this subverted stone ; a hundred ruined realms !" 

If from the beginning of creation, till now, there had 
been no revelation from God, aside from what is in Nature ; 
no angels sent from Heaven, as they came to Abraham 
and Lot ; no prophets, like Samuel and David and Isaiah 
and Daniel ; no Gospel, as recorded by the Evangelists, 



AND THE GOSPEL AFTER GOD. 



45 



and preached by the Apostles ; there would be a very- 
strong presumption against the being of God. Men 
might well ask : If there is a God, why does he not speak 
to us ? God is love. You and I, little as we are like 
Him ; selfish, worldly, unbelieving ; you and I are moved 
to do something, every year, to bring that portion of the 
human family that know Him not, to know and love Him. 
If we feel so ; then, much more God. If God loves man- 
kind, He will, speak to them in the voice of love. He 
will not confine Himself to the works of Nature. The 
argument for this presumption, is this : God knows the 
result of the apostasy from Himself ; His eyes see, His 
eyelids try the children of men ; He knows the condition 
of the human family, in their degradation and sin. It is 
hopeless. If he has any warnings to give them ; if He 
has any remedy to recommend ; if He has any love to 
express ; if He has any promises to make ; we shall hear 
from Him. This is an argument, which prepares us to 
expect something in the way of a Revelation. 

If God would speak to us, He must inspire men to 
know, and communicate what he has to say. Inspiration 
is God's way of getting down to human level, and human 
conditions. The human element in the Bible ; the fact 
that the writers were men of like passions as ourselves ; 
had an earthly setting ; had their earthly history, which 
has entered into the history of the human family ; an- 
chors the Bible in humanity ; is that which gives what 
God has to say, a historic certainty ; roots it, like a tree 
in human soil. You can test the Book of God, as you 
can test any book of man. There is just as much proof 
that there was such a man as St. Paul, as that there was 
such a man as Julius Caesar. I think there is a hundred- 



46 



THE GOSPEL AFTER MAN, 



fold more. A man might say of the Commentaries of 
Caesar : Did any one ever see the original manuscript ? 
The commentaries of this great General are older than 
the Epistles ; are older than the Gospels. Julius Caesar 
was assassinated 44 years before Christ was born. Here 
is a book that he wrote. No one denies this. The 
Apostle Paul wrote the Epistle to the Romans, more than 
a hundred years after Caesar's death. We are more than 
a century nearer the Epistle to the Romans, than we are 
to Caesar's Commentaries. It is not the original manu- 
script that we care for, except as a matter of curiosity. 
I mean, when we consider the question of genuineness. 
It is the estimate put by contemporaries upon the original 
manuscript ; the estimate handed down to us. In his 
youth, the Poet Bryant wrote a remarkable poem : the 
most remarkable of all his productions, though he lived 
to a great age. Perhaps not three of his contemporaries 
ever saw the original manuscript ; and perhaps, there is ♦ 
no one living to-day, who ever saw the poem on the pages 
of the Magazine where it was first published. But, you 
and I believe that Bryant wrote Thanatopsis. Why do we 
believe that? Because Bryant's immediate contempo- 
raries did. And because you and I believe it, our children 
will believe it, and their children will believe it. There 
is no bigotry about this. It is according to a law of 
evidence. It never has been denied that he wrote it. 
We know that he wrote, it just as we know that Caesar 
wrote his commentaries, and the Apostle Paul wrote his 
Epistle to the Romans. Centuries do not change the 
character of evidence. Two thousand years from now, 
some literary agnostic may arise and say, " What proof is 
there that Bryant ever wrote that poem ? Did you ever 



AND THE GOSPEL AFTER GOD, 



47 



see the original manuscript?" It has always borne his 
name. This is answer enough. Somebody wrote it. 
There was a time, when it appeared. Then, it had to be 
accounted for. The account given of it, at that time, 
has never been denied ; and it is as good now, as it was 
then. 

The men who feel, when they ask, "Who ever saw the 
original manuscripts of the New Testament ?" that they 
have dealt a deadly blow at religion ; they have disposed 
of the whole question of their genuineness, are either 
very ignorant of what constitutes proof of genuineness, 
as it relates to ancient books, or they have a great deal of 
effrontery. Who ever saw the original manuscript of any 
standard classical book, to-day in existence ? Take, for 
example, the works of the Greek historian, Herodotus. 
He died between four and .five hundred years before the 
Christian era. The critics know only fifteen manuscript 
copies of his works; several written in the 15th century 
of the Christian era; one in the 12th, and one in the 
10th. His works were first printed in Venice, A. D. 1502. 
Here is a gap of about fourteen hundred years between 
the nearest manuscript -copy of Herodotus' works, and 
the date of his death. And, yet, no one questions their 
authenticity. In the Vatican Library, a copy of Virgil, 
who died 19 years before the birth of Christ, claims an 
antiquity as high as the fourth century ; but, most of the 
existing copies of what are regarded authentic classics are 
attributed to periods between the tenth and fifteenth cen- 
turies. This it not regarded ground for questioning their 
genuineness. There are MS. copies of the Pentateuch 
made in the 2d or 3d century ; and MS. copies of the 
Gospels, dating back to the 3d or 4th century ; and MS. 



4§ 



THE GOSPEL AFTER MAN, 



copies of the entire New Testament, which were made 
in the 8th. And of the New Testament there are in exist- 
ence about 500 different manuscipts in Greek alone. 
Now, if critics accept the proof offered for the genuineness 
of Herodotus, when the first copy in existence is fourteen 
hundred years away from the death of its author ; if they 
accept the genuineness of Virgil, when the earliest copy 
of his works in existence is found in the fourth century ; 
with what reason can they reject the books of the Bible, 
which are some of them less than half the period from 
their authors ? The genuineness of the New Testament 
Scriptures stands upon a better basis than the classical 
literature of Greece and Rome, which we study in our 
Academies and Colleges. 

But, I am asked, " Would it not have been better if 
God had communicated the whole Bible as He did the 
Decalogue, on tablets of stone, written by His own 
hand ?" I think not. I think the human element in the 
Bible is a part of God's wisdom there. The Author of 
the Bible asks for it, only the same fair treatment given 
to other books of mere human origin. This question of 
the genuineness of the books of the Bible, is to be settled 
just as the question of the genuineness of other ancient 
books. Here is the book in our hands, with the presumption 
that God must have it in His heart to prepare such a book. 
It only asks us to apply to it the same tests that are applied 
to the works of pagan historians and poets ; that have no 
such burden of love ; no such presumption of mercy in 
their favor. God does not wish to constrain belief. One 
of the influences which spring from the Bible is this : " It 
awakens inquiry." It sets a man to thinking ; to thinking 
for himself. It not only does not require the settlement 



AND THE GOSPEL AFTER GOD. 



49 



of questions by the authority of churches or councils, it 
wants a man to be fully persuaded in his own mind. 
And this should be our question : " If, with the works of 
Herodotus, in our hands ; works, the original copies of 
which number only fifteen, and the existence of which 
dates back only to the tenth century ; we say : < Yes, you 
are genuine ; you were written by the man whose name 
you bear what shall we say to these writings of Matthew, 
Mark, Luke and John, of which there are some five hun- 
dred copies in Greek ; besides others in the Syriac, the 
Coptic, the Arabic, the Ethiopic, the Armenian, the Per- 
sian, and the Latin ; and whose existence dates back to 
the third and fourth centuries ; or to within three or four 
hundred years of the time when they profess to have 
been written ? Shall we, or shall we not treat the Word 
of God, as we treat other books? 

But, suppose we want to get back of these manuscripts; 
how shall we do it ? Here were two or three centuries 
after these books of the New Testament were written. 
What was the whole known world thinking about during 
this period ? Some of them were reading the originals, 
from which the Manuscrips now in existence were copied. 
How do I know? Let me show you. These Manuscripts 
were circulated, back and forth, among the earlier churches. 
Let me summon into your presence such men as Justin 
Martyr, who was converted A. D. 132, and died in A. D. 
164; Tatian, his pupil, who died A. D. 170; Irenseus, 
the martyr, who died A. D. 202 ; Clement, of Alexandria, 
who died A. D. 213 ; Hermas, Origen and others. Who 
are they? They are some of the early Christians, whose 
writings have come down to us independently of the 
Sacred Scriptures. These writings are tested as to their 



50 



THE GOSPEL AFTER MAN, 



genuineness, just like the writings of Herodotus and 
Virgil. Their relation to the Scriptures is purely inci- 
dental. They were not written to prove the Scriptures 
genuine. But, upon their pages, standing as they were, 
nearer to the writers of the Scriptures than we are to the 
Pilgrim Fathers ; nay, some of them almost as near as 
we are so the Fathers of the Republic : to Washington 
and Jefferson and Adams ; upon these pages, you find 
quotation after quotation, corresponding almost word to 
word to Manuscript copies of the Scriptures now in ex- 
istence. This Clement of Alexandria, who died about 
A. D. 213, has quotations and allusions enough from the 
Old Testament, to make a list filling twelve folio pages, 
double columns ; just the bare references alone. 

I want to show you the force of this argument, upon 
the question of the genuineness of the Bible Scriptures, by a 
comparison. The works of Shakespeare stand at the 
head of the world's literature. They are to literature 
what the Bible is to religion. Carlyle says, "If I say- 
that Shakespeare is the greatest of intellects, I have said 
all concerning him." The time comes, when a Shake- 
speare-know-nothing rises up with this utterance : " These 
works of this Shakespeare of yours are not genuine. He 
never wrote them. There never was such a man. Who 
wrote them, nobody knows." W T hat is the proof that 
this literary agnostic has blundered again ? Go right to 
English Literature, from Shakespeare's time to the present. 
Begin with his contemporaries : the men and women who 
occupy the same relation to literature, that these Latin 
Fathers do to religion ; and finish up with the last book 
ever published ; the last essay ever sketched ; the last 
sermon ever preached ; the last conversation between 



AND THE GOSPEL AFTER GOD. 



51 



cultivated men ever held ; and you have the proof. Just 
as from the time Shakespeare's works were written to the 
present day, there has been no literature worthy of the 
name, which has not been colored and impressed by what 
he wrote ; so from the time of the Christian era to the 
present, there has been no religious literature of the 
Christian Church, which has not shown its indebtedness 
to the Bible. There is no such proof as this, back of the 
earliest manuscipts of Herodotus and Virgil ; and yet, 
they are received as being what they pretend to be. 

II. If there is a God, and He undertakes to communi- 
cate with man, respecting man's wants and woes ; man's 
relation to Him, and man's destiny hereafter, He must 
guarantee that communication to be free from error ; else 
it is of no value. This is the office of inspiration. This 
makes man's Gospel a Gospel after God. And this is 
what St. Paul claims in the text. 

There are somejjeople in this day, that say their inspi- 
ration is as good as St. Paul's. And so we have so-called 
inspired preachers and inspired mediums. The difference 
between the inspiration of such a genius as that of Shake- 
speare, or Milton even, and the inspiration of the sacred 
writers, is mainly this : That the inspiration of the sacred 
writers relates to matters about which man can find out 
nothing for himself. He cannot sink his plummet to 
such depths. He cannot plume his wing to such heights.. 
It is not by searching that they can be found out. Outside 
the lids of the Bible, there is no such inspiration as you 
can find within them. The talk of the wise men of the 
ancients, interesting as it is; and wise in human reason- 
ing, and beyond modern reasoners, as they were, is a sad 
illustration of this. They found no satisfaction ; they 



52 



THE GOSPEL AFTER MAN, 



gave none. You remember Mrs. Stowe's poem, repre- 
senting the pupils of Socrates, as they gather around 
their dying master. It begins thus : 

" We need some charmer ; for our hearts are sore 

With longings for the things, that may not be ; 
Faint for the friends, that shall return no more ; 

Dark with distrust, or wrung with agony. 
What is this life ? And what to us, is death ? 

Whence came we ? Whither go ? And where are those 
Who, in a moment stricken from our side, 

Passed to that land of shadow and repose ?" 

They found him not, those youths of soul divine, 
Long seeking, wand'ring, watching on life's shore ; 

Reasoning, aspiring, yearning for the light ; 

Death came, and found them doubting as before." 

Men sometimes ask, why all the secrets of the earth 
were not revealed : why the sciences were not put into 
the Bible ; geometry and chemistry and physiology and 
astronomy, and the rest. It is enough to say : That 
they can be found out without a revelation. They are 
left for man's development ; to keep his mind busy, to 
educate him. The Bible was not written to communicate 
things to men, that were within their reach ; that could 
be discovered by microscopes and telescopes ; by chemi- 
cal analysis ; and expeditions to Palestine ; by sitting at 
the feet of Nature, and learning of her. Nature makes 
many moral suggestions ; but, is not a moral revelation. 
She is a revelation mainly confined to the natural attributes 
of God. About the future world, she is as dumb as the 
Sphynx. She remembers her sentence : " Thorns and 
thistles." She groans and travails in pain. The voice of 
Nature is the voice of law : not of forgiveness. The 
voice of Nature is a voice of death, and not of life. 
Read Thanatopsis. That is the voice of Nature, accord- 



AND THE GOSPEL AFTER GOD. 



53 



ing to her best interpreter. It cannot be called a religious 
poem. The most comforting thought the poet has, is of 
the earth, as a grand mausoleum ; a whirling God's Acre ; 
the sepulchre of the Ages ; the tomb of humanity ; where 
we can have silent companionship with the patriarchs ; 
and of death, as a sleep, as of a tired pilgrim at an inn. 
It is death, looked at by the light of Nature ; not by the 
light of Revelation. Revelation takes us beyond ; gives 
us a Biotopsis through Thanatopsis ; life through death. 
The poet is true to his idea. Nature has nothing articulate 
to say, as to man's origin ; as to man's accountability ; 
as to man's hereafter ; except this, that he is under law, 
and that law takes its course. This search for the origin 
of life ; this search for the genesis of the being, whom 
God has made in His own image ; this search in the vol- 
ume of Nature, is looking for something in Nature, which 
God has not revealed there. Men come back from it, as 
our explorers from the Polar Regions. There is no open 
sesame to those doors, where God hides himself. " Who 
am I ? What is this Me ? A voice, a motion, an appear- 
ance ; some enbodied, visualized idea in the Eternal 
Mind ? Cogito, ergo sum. Alas, poor cogitators, this 
takes us but a little way. Sure enough, I am ; and lately 
was not : but, Whence ? How ? Whereto ? The answer 
lies around, written in all colors and motions, uttered in 
all tones of jubilee and wail, in thousand-figured, thou- 
sand-voiced, harmonious Nature ; but where is the cun- 
ning eye and ear, to whom that God -written Apocalypse 
will yield articulate meaning?" There is only One 
Being, who ever walked the earth, that has ever had this 
cunning eye, of which Carlyle speaks. There is only 
One Being, such as the disciples of Socrates yearned 



45 



THE GOSPEL AFTER NAN, 



after ; and He was born in Bethlehem, and not in Athens. 
And He came here as a Revealer and an Interpreter of 
God the Father ; and knowing God, He knew Nature. 
He came here to answer those questions, Whence ? How ? 
Whereto ? and He has answered them. And there will 
be no other answer. He is Alpha, He is Omega, and 
there is no more vision. This is Mrs. Stowe again : 

" But, years passed on — and lo, the Charmer came, 

Pure, silent, sweet as is the silver dew. 
' Let not your heart be troubled,' then, He said, 

1 My Father's house has mansions, large and fair ; 
I go before you, to prepare your place ; 

I will return, to take you with me there.' 
And since that hour, the awful Foe is charmed, 

And life and death are glorified and fair ; 
Wither He went, we know, the way we know, 

And with firm step, press on to meet Him there." 

Whatever imperfection is incidental to the media by 
which truth has been communicated to man, we are to 
hold to this, that the truth is perfect. It is accurate. It 
is complete. It is what there is, and all there is. It 
came from God, and not from man. Here is where the 
line of battle is to be drawn up. When an eminent 
clergyman of Boston, who rejects what are called Evan- 
gelical doctrines, writes as follows, we may regard it as a 
a virtual withdrawal of forces, on the part of the candid 
and intelligent, as to the question what the Bible teaches. 
I refer to the Rev. Dr. George E. Ellis, and this is what 
he writes : "I have carefully considered the words and the 
thoughts which I am about to express, fully apprehending 
their serious bearings, and that they may startle and 
grieve some others, if not you." He is addressing the 
Unitarian Club ot Boston. " Fifty years of study, thought 
and reading, given largely to the Bible and the literature 



AND THE GOSPEL AFTER GOD. 



55 



which peculiarly relates to it, have brought me to this 
conclusion : That the Book, taken with the especial divine 
quality and character claimed for it, and so extensively 
assigned to it, as inspired and infallible as a whole, and 
in all its contents, is an Orthodox book. It yields what 
is called the Orthodox creed. The vast majority of 
readers, following its letter, its obvious sense, its natural 
meaning, and yielding to the impression, which some of 
its emphatic texts make upon them, find in it, Orthodoxy. 
Only that kind of ingenious, special, discriminative, and 
in candor, I must add, forced treatment, which it receives 
from us Liberals, can make it teach anything but Ortho- 
doxy. The Evangelical sects, so called, are clearly right 
in maintaining that their view of the Scripture and of its 
doctrines, draws a deep and wide division between them 
and ourselves." 

In such a book as Caesar's Commentaries, you find it 
stated that in Scotland there are thirty days of total 
darkness in the winter. No Scotchman would admit that 
there is much darkness there, at any season of the year : 
He is always bound to defend his native land. A state- 
ment like this, which was evidently the result of being 
misinformed, does not vitiate the general historical accu- 
racy of the book. It is a book of battles, and not geog- 
raphy. It has to do with Gaul, and not with Scotland. 
But, such a mistake in the Bible, if it should relate to 
that for which the Bible was given, would condemn the 
whole book. Caesar's Commentaries were not intended to 
contain accurate geographical information respecting 
Scotland. But, convict them of errors of statement as to 
the locality of nations and tribes ; as to the course of 
rivers ; as to the place where battles were fought ; as to 



56 



THE GOSPEL AFTER MAN. 



anything, which the sphere of his book covers, and you 
have a right to be suspicious of all the rest of the book. 
When it is claimed for the Bible, that it came from God, 
and that God is accountable for the accuracy of its state- 
ments as to who created the Universe ; as to who created 
man ; as to the fact of man's sinfulness, and as to God's 
remedy for it ; it is claimed that during the long period 
of its composition, under the hand of so many different 
writers, God preserved these writers from all error, which 
could affect its complete fitness for its mission here ; name- 
ly, to convince men of their need of God, and show them 
how He has met it. Dr. Ellis says, that after studying 
the Bible for a half-century, he concludes that it is an 
Orthodox book. It is one book. It is a harmonious book. 
Taken as a whole, there is only one response that can be 
got out of it. Force its meaning, twist its statements, 
wrest them from their bearing and connection, you can 
get almost anything out of it ; and it is valueless, just in 
proportion to the violence done. 

It is said, that God created man out of the dust of the 
earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, 
and he became a living soul. That is under the Old Dis- 
pensation. See what He does under the New. See what 
comes of His new inbreathing. See how He takes such 
men as Matthew and Mark and Luke and makes historians 
of them. Here is literature, which stands at the head of 
the literature of the world ; and these men are the authors 
of it. These Memorabilia of the Man Christ Jesus, as 
recorded by the Evangelist, did you ever compare them 
with those of the Greek historian Xenophon ? Do they 
suffer in the comparison ? These Memorabilia have all 
the fascination of life itself. How could this Matthew, 



AND THE GOSPEL AFTER GOD. 



57 



the publican, arrive at the sentiments of the Sermon on 
the Mount, unless he were recording actual utterances ? 
How did he come by this fascinating picture of the Lord 
Jesus Christ ? Here is where God displays His wisdom 
in speaking by man : and by such a man. He puts this 
treasure into earthern vessels ; that we see they are only 
vessels. Begin the chapter of the Beatitudes. Read them. 
Can you find anything more beautiful in Shakespeare ? 
Translate the passage ; the severest test of literature. It 
goes into other language just as beautiful as it is in our 
own ; or in the Greek in which it was first written. For, 
Dean Alford finally gave it as his opinion, that it was 
first written in Greek, and not in Hebrew. It is like a 
diamond, current everywhere, whatever the currency. 
Take this narrative, at random, from the ninth chapter of 
Matthew's Gospel : " While he spoke these things unto 
them, behold, there came a certain ruler and worshipped 
Him, saying, ' My daughter is even now dead ; but, 
come and lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live.' 
And Jesus arose and followed him, and so did his disci- 
ples. And, behold, a woman, which was diseased with an 
issue of blood twelve years, came behind Him, and 
touched the hem of His garment. For she said within her- 
self, 1 If I may but touch His garment, I shall be whole.' 
But, Jesus turned about ; and when He saw her, He said, 
• Daughter, be of good comfort ; thy faith hath made thee 
whole.' And the woman was made whole, from that 
very hour. And when Jesus came into the ruler's house, 
and saw the minstrels and the people making a noise, He 
said unto them, * Give place ; for the maid is not dead, 
but sleepeth.' And they laughed Him to scorn. But, 
when the people were put forth, He went in and took 



58 



THE GOSPEL AFTER MAN, 



her by the hand, and the maid arose. And the fame 
hereof went abroad into all that land." 

Who taught Matthew, the publican, this masterly art of 
putting things ? this simplicity, and directness, and terse- 
ness of speech ? Try to make a paraphrase of the passage 
yourself ; you, who have sat at the feet of great masters, 
in all the great languages, written and spoken. You can 
not rewrite it, without seeming to weaken it. And remem- 
ber what I have reminded you of before : namely, that* 
there is just the same kind of proof that Matthew wrote 
this, and all the rest of the Gospel bearing his name, as 
there is that Virgil or Herodotus wrote the works at- 
tributed to them ; the same kind of proof, but a great 
deal more of it. It is often urged, as one reason why 
men are so unwilling to take the Gospel records as authori- 
tative, that the great Teacher Himself wrote nothing. 
He did write nothing. But, He certainly knew how im- 
portant it would be, that mankind should have just what 
He said, and know just what He did, and what He 
meant by it. If these sacred writers, these men who had 
attended Him, were to be inspired for their work ; if they 
were to be kept from error ; then, we can see how unne- 
cessary the work of Himself recording His own sayings 
and doings ; we can account for this seeming neglect on 
His own part. 

III. If God makes supernatural communications to 
man, when the work is accomplished, the peculiar kind 
of inspiration required, will cease; because it is no 
longer needed. God is a strict economist.. 

Some people confound the office of inspiration, in order 
to a revelation, and its office, in order to salvation. I 
believe that you and I may have the same Spirit that the 



AND THE GOSPEL AFTER GOD. 



59 



Evangelists and the Apostles had ; the Spirit which in- 
spired the Bible. But, He does not come to us, that we 
may add to the revelations already made by Him. There 
are no new facts to be given. He comes to us, to bring 
to our remembrance and to interpret old facts ; to con- 
vince us of them, and move us to act upon them. There 
were no new revelations made on that great day of the 
outpouring of God's Spirit, in Jerusalem. The day of 
Pentecost was not a day which added any new truth to 
the Scripture canon. The simple truths recorded in the 
Gospels were what Peter relied on, when he preached 
that sermon, which was so blessed to thousands. The 
tendency in these days, is to try to read something into 
the Bible, which the Holy Spirit has not put there. And, 
we hear what Canon Farrar has to say on the other side 
of the water, and what Mr. Beecher has to say on this 
side the water, as to what will be in the future. But, do 
they give us any evidence that God has made a new reve- 
lation to them? And if they are the ministers of Christ, 
what right have they to preach their speculations and con- 
jectures? This is to give a Gospel after man. 

In the establishment of Christianity, there are certain 
things essential, which cease to be so when it has been 
established. There is no longer any need of inspiration 
such as the Apostles had. There is no longer any need 
of miracles. The miracles were for all time, just as in- 
spiration was. They did their work then ; they do it 
forevermore. Some people say, the miracles were for 
the contemporaries of Christ, and not for us, upon whom 
these ends of the world have come. They are for us, as 
a part of the Gospel narratives. They are for us, to pre- 
vent us from being imposed upon, by pretended revealers 



60 



THE GOSPEL AFTER MAN, 



of our own time. They are the seals and signature of 
Jehovah, to the last will and testament of His love. The 
raising of Lazarus ; nay, the resurrection of Christ, is the 
great seal of the kingdom. Perhaps, some of you have 
seen a fac simile of the original warrant to execute 
Charles the First of England, in 1648. It is signed by 
Oliver Cromwell, and fifty-eight others. But every 
signature has a seal attached ; and every seal has the 
coat of arms of the signer. These signatures and the 
seals were the guarantee of the Government, to the offi- 
cers to whom the warrant was addressed , that the proposed 
execution was their deed. Have they ceased to have a 
meaning now ? They have gone into history. They are 
a part of the res gestce. The miracles of the Gospel - 
narratives, consisting of works such as no other man ever 
did, are God's guarantee to mankind, that He is behind 
the Gospel ; that these Evangelists and Apostles were 
employed by Him for the purpose of conveying truth to 
men, which they had no means of finding out ; that He 
is speaking to them, and through them to us. As facts, 
these miracles have taken their place in history. And, 
they account, in part, for the results of early Apostolic 
labors. The resurrection was the culmination of them. 
Jesus Himself appealed to them : " If I do not the works 
of my Father, believe me not ; but, if I do, though ye 
believe not me, believe the works ;" and again, " If I had 
not done among them the works which none other man 
did, they had not had sin ; but now they have both seen 
and hated, both me and my Father." The Apostle 
Peter, too, in charging home upon the Jews the crime of 
His Master's death, speaks of Him as " Jesus of Nazareth, 
.a man approved of God among them, by miracles and 



AND THE GOSPEL AFTER GOD. 



61 



wonders and signs, which God did by Him, in the midst 
of them, as they themselves also knew." 

The results of the work of Oliver Cromwell and his 
associates, you and I feel to-day. That death-warrant 
was a life-warrant to the nations ; was a charter of human 
freedom for all time to come. The life of a king is not 
so sacred as the life of the people. It is a matter of 
history that it was thus signed and sealed ; and that all 
this grew out of it : the American Revolution ; perhaps, 
Free America. Suppose the original document had been 
lost, would you doubt whether there were such a docu- 
ment ? You say miracles cannot be proved. I say the 
admitted facts of sacred history are improbable without 
them. Here is a company of Twelve Men, who attach 
themselves to this Jesus of Nazareth : as a Divine Teacher 
and Guide. All their ideas of such a Teacher, they had 
inherited. And the very first question which would arise 
in their minds, was the one put to Him by the Jews : 
" What sign showest thou, that we may see and believe ? 
Our fathers did eat manna in the desert, as it is written, 
He gave them bread from Heaven to eat !" That shows 
the working of the Jewish mind. This insisting on a 
sign and seal had been encouraged by Jehovah from the 
first. When God wanted Moses to appear as His repre- 
sentative before the children of Israel, what was his an- 
swer : " But, behold, they will not believe me, nor 
hearken to my voice. For, they will say, ' The Lord 
hath not appeared unto thee.' And the Lord said unto 
him, < What is that in thine hand ?' And he said a rod. 
And He said, * Cast it on the ground.' And he cast it 
on the ground, and it became a serpent : and Moses fled 
before it. And the Lord said to Moses, ' Put forth thine 



62 



THE GOSPEL AFTER MAN. 



hand and take it.' And he put forth his hand and caught 
it, and it became a rod in his hand." And it was that 
rod which smote the rivers of Egypt, and they became 
blood ; which smote them again, and there came up from 
them swarming frogs ; it was that rod, which smote the 
dust of the earth, and it became lice throughout all the 
land of Egypt ; which smote the earth again, and it 
swarmed with flies; in a word, it was that rod which brought 
plague after plague upon the Egyptians ; which divided 
the Red Sea, which smote the rock, and it gave forth 
water. That rod was the insignia of Moses' office, as a 
leader. Generations afterwards, here comes another pro- 
phet, claiming to be like unto Moses. Think you, that 
His disciples will take Him without some supernatural 
signs ; without some seal from Heaven, that He has been 
sent of God ? And, yet, they did take Him ; and 
were willing to die for Him. Never, without miracles. 

Says Canon Mozley, " If, then, a person of evident in- 
tegrity and loftiness of character, rose into notice in a 
particular country and community, eighteen centuries 
ago, who made these communications about Himself: 
that He had existed before His natural birth, from all 
eternity, and before the world was, in a state of glory 
before God ; that He was the only begotten Son of God ; 
that the world itself had been made by Him ; that He 
had, however, come down from Heaven, and assumed 
the form and nature of man, for a particular purpose : 
namely, to be the Lamb of God, that taketh away the 
sins of the world ; that He thus stood in a mysterious 
and supernatural relation to the whole of mankind ; that 
through Him alone, man had access to God ; that He 
was the head of an invisible Kingdom, into which He 



AND THE GOSPEL AFTER GOD, 



63 



would gather all the generations of righteous men, who 
had lived in the world; that, on His departure from 
hence, He should return to Heaven, and prepare mansions 
there for them ; and lastly, that He should descend again 
at the end of the world to judge the whole human race ; 
on which occasion all that were in their graves should 
hear His voice and come forth, they that had done good 
unto the resurrection of life ; and they that had done 
evil, unto the resurrection of damnation ; if this Person 
should make such assertions about Himself, and all that 
was done was to make the assertions ; what would be the 
inevitable conclusion of sober reason, respecting that 
Person ? The necessary conclusion of sober reason 
respecting that Person, would be, that He was disordered 
in His understanding. Miracles are the necessary com- 
plement of the truth of such announcements ; which, 
without them, are purposeless and abortive ; the unfinished 
fragments of a design, which is nothing, unless it is the 
whole. They are necessary to the justification of such 
announcements ; which, indeed, unless they are super- 
natural truths, are the wildest delusions. The matter, 
and its guarantee are the two parts of a revelation, the 
absence of either of which neutralizes and undoes it." 

This Jesus of Nazareth made precisely these represen- 
tations respecting Himself ; and His disciples believed 
them. It is impossible, unless He wrought the miracles, 
which are attributed to Him. 

IV. I want to attempt to correct an attitude which is 
sometimes assumed with reference to the Bible, namely 
this : That because of the nature of the subject-matter of 
the Bible, it must be held to a severer test, than any other 
book. This is neither fair nor candid. Proof is proof. 



64 



THE GOSPEL AFTER MAN, 



Sufficiency of proof in one case, is sufficiency in another. 
I have tried, in this discussion, to show that there is a 
presumption that God will speak to us in a Book ; in a 
Book written by man. That if He does this, He is bound 
to prevent men from getting uninspired utterances into 
it ; from substituting what they have to say, for what He 
has to say ; and that when He has made His Book, He 
will cease to inspire additions to it. It will stop, just as 
it began. 

And here, as it seems to me, we reach the true principle 
by which the genuineness of this Book should be tested : 
That amount of evidence which should prove the history 
of Herodotus genuine, ought to prove the history of 
Moses or Matthew ; that amount of evidence which should 
prove the poems of Virgil or Horace genuine, ought to 
prove the poems of David and Isaiah. Isaac Taylor, in 
his work on " The Transmission of Ancient Books," says, 
" The validity of evidence in proof of remote facts is not 
affected, either for the better or for the worse, by the 
weight of consequences that may depend upon them. No 
principle can be more obviously true than this ; and yet, 
none is more often disregarded. With the same sort of 
inconsistency which impels us to measure the punishment 
of an offence, not by its turpitude, but by the amount of 
injury it may have occasioned, we are instinctively in- 
clined to think the most slender evidence good enough, 
in proof of a point which is of no importance ; while we 
distrust the best evidence, as if it were feeble, on any 
occasion when the fact in question involves great and 
pressing interests. We are apt to think of evidence as if 
it were a cord or wire, which though it may sustain a 
certain weight, must needs snap with a greater. It is 
very true that the degree of care, diligence and atten- 



AND THE GOSPEL AFTER GOD. 



65 



tion, with which we examine evidence, may well be pro- 
portioned to the importance of the consequences that 
are involved in the decision. A juryman ought, indeed, to 
give his utmost attention to testimony, that may sentence 
a prisoner to a month's confinement ; but, if he be open 
to the common feelings of humanity, he will exercise a 
tenfold caution, when life or death is to be the issue of 
his verdict. This is very proper ; but, no one who is 
capable of reasoning justly, would think that if the proof 
of guilt in the former case has been thoroughly examined, 
and is quite conclusive, it can become a jot less convinc- 
ing, if it should be found, that some new interpretation 
of the law makes the offence capital. The genuineness 
of the satires and epistles of Horace, is allowed by all 
scholars to be unquestionable ; and any one who has 
examined the evidence, must call him a mere sophist who 
should attempt to raise a controversy on the subject. 
Would the case be otherwise, even though the proof of 
the genuineness of these writings should overthrow the 
British constitution; or, should make it the duty of 
every man to resign his property to his servant ? The 
evidence of the genuineness and authenticity of the Jew- 
ish and Christian Scriptures, has, for no other reason 
than a thought of the consequences that are involved in 
the admission of their truth, been treated with an unwar- 
rantable disregard of logical equity : and even of the 
dictates of common sense. The poems of Anacreon, the 
tragedies of Sophocles, the plays of Terence, the epistles 
of Pliny, are adjudged to be safe from the imputation of 
spuriousness, and of material corruption ; and yet, evi- 
dence, ten times greater as to quantity, variety and force, 
supports the genuineness of the poems of Isaiah, and the 
epistles of Paul." 



66 



THE GOSPEL AFTER MAN, 



I go further than this. For, if there is a presumption 
that God will communicate directly with mankind ; any 
Book, claiming to be from God, other things being equal, 
deserves fairer treatment from our hands, as to the matter 
of its genuineness, than a book which claims to be the 
word of man. We have no presumption in favor of a 
Herodotus or a Horace. Our relations to God are so im- 
portant ; the truths we need to know from Him, are so 
many ; we are so bewildered and helpless without them ; 
that the Bible appears with a prima facie case, which can 
not be rejected, unless there are stronger arguments 
against it than would lead us to reject a book of human 
origin, of equal antiquity. So that we find ourselves put 
to a test of our candor and fairness, in the treatment of 
this Book, which is really a test of our character. 

The Apostle Paul says in the text, " I certify you, 
brethren, that the Gospel which was preached of me, was 
not after man ; for, I neither received it of man, neither 
was I taught it ; but by the revelation of Jesus Christ." 
This Gospel, in the form in which Paul preached it and 
wrote it, we have in our hands. There is just as much 
proof of it, as of the genuineness of any ancient book 
in existence. I believe there is a hundredfold more. 
This Gospel we have. " Whereunto," in the words of 
another Apostle, "we do well to take heed, as unto a 
light that shineth in a dark place, until the daydawn and 
the daystar arise in your hearts ; knowing this, that no 
prophecy or scripture is of any private interpretation. 
For the prophecy came not, in old time, by the will of 
man ; but, holy men of God spake as they were moved 
by the Holy Ghost." 



IV. 



BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 

Gal. vi : 2. — " Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the 
law of Christ." 

There are some burdens which can not actually be 
shared, because they can not be communicated. So that 
there is another passage : " Let every man bear his own 
burden." When the Saviour retired to the Garden of 
Olives the night of His betrayal, Peter, and James, and 
John could not drink with Him of that cup which the 
Father gave. It was a cup which He had to drink alone. 
But they could have watched with Him ; they could have 
shown their sympathy. This was all He asked : " Tarry 
ye here and watch." It is often the case when death's 
shadows are falling around our dearest ones that all we 
can do is to watch, and see the flickering flame expire. 
That shares the burden. 

When the great heart of Mr. Webster was ceasing to 
beat at Marshfield, the sick man said to Peter Harvey of 
Boston, whom he would see in spite of his physicians, as 
he stretched up and put his arms around his neck, " I 
am not so ill but that I know you. I am sick, but not 
too sick to call down blessings on you, my faithful friend, 
true in life, true in death.. I shall be dead tomorrow. 
Do not leave this room until I am gone. Promise me, 



63 



BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 



that you will not." He promised, and kept his promise. 

" On some fond breast the parting soul relies, 
Some pious drops the closing eye requires ; 

E'en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, 
E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires." 

It is said to be impossible in the physical world to cre- 
ate a new force. But it is not so in the spiritual world. 
Two praying together have more than double the faith of 
each ; two suffering together have far more than twice 
the strength of each. Daniel Webster dying, though he 
had constant and skillful medical advisers ; though he 
had the care of faithful friends and attendants ; though 
as President Pierce said, " a nation's heart beat sadly at 
his tomb," wanted Peter Harvey there to share with 
him the burden of death. 

The subject which I shall discuss this morning, is 

BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 

And I remark 

I. That the first instinct of human nature is to be im- 
patient under our own burdens ; to feel that we have 
scarcely strength for them, not to think of those of our 
neighbors. 

That every one has his own burdens ; burdens which 
are peculiar to himself ; burdens which attach to his own 
position, character, or lot in life ; burdens which some- 
times seem to him too heavy to bear, we all know from 
our observation, as well as from our experience. " The 
heart knoweth his own bitterness." Childhood has its 
burdens ; youth, manhood, middle life, old age ; father- 
hood, motherhood, bachelorhood, old -maidenhood, busi- 
ness life, domestic life. With a great many people, the 



BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 



69 



vicissitudes of life, life's changes, come from vainly 
attempting to exchange the burden of one lot or position 
for the burden of another. But burdens can not be 
escaped. If they do not weigh down one shoulder they 
do the other. If they do not blister our hands, they gall 
our backs. 

But if we had no burdens we should have no character. 
One burden results in courage ; another in patience ; 
another in perseverance ; another in resignation ; another 
in faith ; all in character. We often read with a fictitious 
and sentimental sympathy of the hardships experienced 
by a child growing up in the backwoods without child- 
hood books, and childhood sports ; taking premature 
burdens upon himself for self-support, or the support of 
others. As if there were nothing better than childhood, 
beautiful as that is ! We almost always find that such a 
discipline results in a character for manliness which comes 
in no other way. There are a great many little men and 
little women in the homes of the poor ; brave and heroic 
hearts in little frames, nurtured for future heroisms. 
Some young men, too, will take upon themselves the 
care of a widowed mother, and the younger children of 
the household, before they are fairly out of their teens, 
will be as industrious, and saving, and provident, ay, as 
paternal ; as though they were men in middle life. Is 
there anything higher or nobler for them than this ? It 
is a moral education for them. How much better than 
the frivolous life of a pleasure seeker, or the spendthrift ! 

We read pityingly of the student-life in the Universities 
of Scotland so long ago, as when Thomas Carlyle set out 
on foot to walk a hundred miles from Ecclefechan to Ed- 
inburgh ; so like what some of us may have seen in New 



70 BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 

England. Froude says of these students : " They were 
sent to Edinburgh or Glasgow, or wherever it might 
be, when they were mere boys of fourteen. They had 
no one to look out for them on their journey, or when 
they came to the end. They walked from their homes, 
being unable to pay their coach hire. They entered 
their own names at the college. They found their own 
humble lodgings, and were left entirely to their own 
capacity for self-conduct. The carriers brought them 
oatmeal, potatoes and salt-butter from the home-farm, 
with a few eggs occasionally, as a luxury. With their 
thrifty habits they required no other food. In the return 
cart, their linen went back to their mothers to be washed 
and mended. Poverty protected them from temptations 
to vicious amusements. They formed their economical 
friendships ; they shared their breakfasts and their 
thoughts ; and had their clubs for conversation and dis- 
cussion. When term was over, they walked home m 
parties ; each district having its little knot belonging to 
it ; and, known along the road as University scholars, 
they were assured of entertainment on the way." " How 
strangely vivid, how remote and wonderful," says Carlyle, 
in 1866, " tinged with the hues of far-off love and sadness, 
is that journey to me, now after fifty-seven years of time. 
My mother and father walking with me, in the dark, 
frosty November morning, through the village, to set us 
on our way ; my dear and loving mother, her tremulous 
affection !" 

Ah ! how much better this, than the student -life de- 
scribed in "Tom Brown at Oxford," where young men 
with plenty of money wasted their substance in riotous 
living, indifferent to their own highest interests, and to 



BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 7 1 

the fact that serious life was before them. " St. Ambrose 
College," writes the author, " was a moderate sized one. 
There might have been some seventy or eighty under- 
graduates in residence, when our hero appeared there as 
freshman. Of these, unfortunately for the College, there 
were a very large proportion of gentlemen commoners ; 
enough, in fact, with the other men they drew around 
them, and who lived pretty much as they did, to form 
the largest and leading set in the college. So, the col- 
lege was decidedly fast. The chief characteristics of this 
set was the most reckless extravagance of every kind. 
London wine-merchants furnished their liquors at a 
guinea a bottle ; and wine at five guineas a dozen. Ox- 
ford and London tailors vied with one another in pro- 
viding them with unheard-of quantities of the most gor- 
geous clothing. They drove tandems in all directions, 
scattering their ample allowances, which they treated as 
pocket money about roadside inns, and Oxford taverns, 
with open hand ; and " going tick " for everything which 
could by possibility be booked. Their cigars cost two 
guineas a pound ; their furniture was the very best that 
could be bought ; pine-apples, forced fruit, and the most 
rare preserves figured at their parties ; they hunted, rode 
steeple-chases by day, played billiards till the gates 
closed, and then were ready for vingt-et-une, unlimited 
loo, and hot drink in their inn rooms as long as any one 
could be got to sit up and play. The fast set then 
swamped and gave tone to the college ; at which no per- 
sons were more astonished and horrified than the authori- 
ties of St. Ambrose." 

Life is a great deal better arranged than we think it. 
The burdens of poverty are the safeguard and inspiration 



72 BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 

of youth. It is a blessing to many a lad that he can not 
go to College. It is a blessing to many another that he 
has no money to spend when he is there. It would be 
an instructive thing for a young man to look over the 
brief biographical summary relating to each Senator and 
Member of the House, in the Congressional Directory. 
These men have not been made by their outward advan- 
tages. Some of them were born in Ireland ; some in 
Scotland ; some in Germany, and some as slaves in 
America. Scarcely more than one-third of them are 
College graduates. A majority of them had only a com- 
mon school and academic education. Not a dozen of 
them graduated at what are regarded the best Colleges. 
Many started in life as farmers, printers, miners, clerks ; 
some as sailors, and some as the sons of widows. Several 
were once pages, where now they sit as Senators. Not 
one of them seems to be ashamed of his inferior advan- 
tages, and humble origin. Doubtless all of them have 
carried heavy burdens in their day. And the carrying 
of these burdens has given tnem the qualities of charac- 
ter for which they have been distinguished. 

In his Essay on Self-Reliance, Mr. Emerson says : " If 
our young men miscarry in their first enterprise, they 
lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he 
is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our Col- 
leges, and is not installed in an office within one year 
afterwards, in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New 
York, it seems to his friends, and to himself, that he is 
right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest 
of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Ver- 
mont, who, in turns tries all the professions ; who teams 
it, farms it, peddles, keeps school, preaches, edits a news- 



BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 73 

paper, goes to Congress, buys a township and so forth, 
in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his 
feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks 
abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not study- 
ing a profession ; for, he does not postpone his life, but 
lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred 
chances." 

One of the great perils of American civilization comes 
from the fact, that our school systems do not provide 
opportunities for industrial training ; that we are all the 
time educating our children away from things. Children 
who are brought up in the country ; who are familiar 
with the processes of Nature ; with the use of farming 
utensils ; who know how to plant corn and potatoes ; 
who know how to milk and make butter ; who are famil- 
iar with the work done by carpenters, shoemakers and 
blacksmiths ; who have seen a door made and a horse 
shod ; may have some limitations and hardships, some 
burdens which are not incident to city life ; but they are 
all the time put to school to the various industries which 
men pursue for a living ; they are all the time subjected 
to an education which books can not give them. I 
would not be guilty of ridiculing our common sehool 
system, but it has this defect. I cut the following slip 
from the New York Tribune of last week : 

" An examination of the younger children of the pub- 
lic schools of Boston, made by Dr. Stanley Hall, showed 
that 18 per cent of the number had no knowledge of a 
cow, further than that gained from pictures ; 61 per cent 
of those examined had never seen an ant ; 65 per cent 
had never seen corn growing ; 90 per cent did not know 
where their ribs were, nor exactly what they were, while 
only six per cent were ignorant of the location of their 



74 BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 

stomachs. Some of the children stated that flour comes 
from the grocer, who gets it directly from God ; others 
said that meat is dug from the ground, or picked up from 
the meat tree. From these facts Dr. Hall deduced two 
other facts : that a gross ignorance of practical things 
may exist side by side with a very thorough book knowl- 
edge, and that some modification of the kindergarten 
method, is necessary in the instruction of the young." 

Nature's kindergarten are the industries of practical life. 
And the children of the middling classes, especially in 
the country, she instructs as they go along in life, in her 
Free School. 

II. The bearing of one's own burdens is the best 
method which we can adopt indirectly to help other peo- 
ple bear theirs. A great many of the heavily -burdened 
people in the world are carrying burdens which do not 
belong to them ; burdens which some one else ought to 
share with them ; burdens which somebody else has 
thrown off upon their shoulders. 

Carlyle ridicules the great London preacher, Edward 
Irving, who is down at the seaside with his wife and six 
weeks' old baby. Thus he describes him to Miss Welsh, 
who afterwards became Mrs. Carlyle : " It would do your 
heart good to see him in the character of dry nurse to 
his first-born, Edward. Oh ! that you saw the giant 
with his broad -brimmed hat, his sallow visage, and his 
sable, matted fleece of hair, carrying the little pepper-box 
of a creature folded in his monstrous palms along the 
beach ; tick, ticking to it, and dandling it, heedless of 
the crowds of petrified spectators, that turn round in 
long trains, gazing in silent terror at the fatherly levia- 
than." This is all very brilliant and very easily written. 
But you and I know that there was more of the kingdom 



BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 



75 



of God in that act, than in the most eloquent sermon 
that Irving ever preached to the gaping crowds which 
waited on his ministry in London. 

The burdens of domestic life are too frequently un- 
shared by man. Not only so, they are often made 
grievous to be borne, because of man's unfitness for the 
office of husband and father ; because of his indifference 
to what his wife has to bear and to suffer. There is a 
great deal of the barbarian still in human, shall 1 say in 
man's nature. The Indian makes his wife cultivate the 
fields and carry the burdens, while he spends his time in 
the manlier sports of hunting and fishing. I have no 
sympathy with this modern disposition, on the slightest 
pretext of difference to break away from the bonds of 
married life. It is not worthy of Christian women. And 
yet I think the law of Christ requires that those whom 
the Bible calls no more twain, but one, should be one in 
bearing the burdens of their lot ; and that man, espe- 
cially, as the stronger vessel, should be anxious to take 
his share. 

Go into some families and you see a disposition to get 
along with the least personal inconvenience possible. 
Every body is on his guard, has his pickets out, lest some 
individual right may be invaded. There is no spirit of 
reciprocal helpfulness. If there are children, they are 
like so many little Ishmaels, quarreling and bickering 
over mine and thine. The father is the greatest Ishmael 
of them all. He is the Colossus which bestrides that lit- 
tle world ; and every son of his bestrides in his turn, as 
much as he can compass. This has nothing to do with 
government. This is anarchy. There is no more gov- 
ernment in such a household, than there is in the Turkish 



;6 



BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 



Empire. Go into other families, and there is a mutual 
consideration and attention such as makes everything 
move on as though under an ordinance of Heaven. The 
first thing which the father does, is to govern himself. 
Self-government is his own burden, and he bears it. Be- 
cause his work has gone wrong ; because he has been 
reprimanded by his superior ; because his stocks have 
gone down, or his silver mine has exploded, it is no rea- 
son why things should be made to go wrong, as between 
himself and his wife andchildren. They are not responsi- 
ble. The way many a father does, isto come home and roll 
his burden which he has been accumulating all day like 
a snowball off upon his family. The first greeting is 
embittered by it. The children recognize it on the 
darkened brow, or in the sharp intonation, or impatient 
gesture. The mother wearied all day by the presence 
and wants of her little brood, and looking to the coming 
of the father as the event that is to bring deliverance, 
feels that her own burden is increased by the burdens 
rolled upon her and her children by this great giant of 
a man. 

Some of you, who hear me, perhaps, think it is undig- 
nified for the pulpit to descend to such topics as these. 
You interpret Christianity to mean hearing preaching, 
criticising the preacher, sitting in seraphic frames and 
singing yourself or letting others sing you away into a 
kind of Occidental Buddhism ; attending prayer meet- 
ings, doing Christian work at home, or giving of your 
substance to convert the heathen. But do you know 
how little Christianity deals with single duties; how 
largely it leaves itself as a great principle to be applied 
according to every man's own conscience in the sight of 



BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 77 

God ; that when it says : " Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself," it 
does not branch off to specify the ten thousand offices 
of love which are in our daily life ? And yet in spite of 
this characteristic of it, that it is more a principle than a 
system of Ethics, we have whole chapters of the Bible 
devoted to our carriage toward each other in domestic 
life ; in that unnoticed drama in which only God and 
the angels are the spectators ; where the curtain is lifted 
only toward the world not seen, but eternal. I say, we 
have whole chapters of precepts as to how the husband 
shall treat the wife ; and the wife the husband ; the 
parents the children, and children the parents ; ay, ad- 
dressed also to servants and their masters ! 

Do not understand me, at all, as disparaging Christian 
activity in any and every department of Christian effort. 
I put a high value upon them ; not the highest, I admit. 
I put the highest value upon Christian carriage in home- 
life. A man can masquerade as a Christian anywhere 
better than in his home. And if I were asked after any 
man's Christian character, I should say : " Take the testi- 
mony of his wife and children ; of his colored or Irish 
servants ; of his horses or his dogs ; swear his cats, or his 
chickens." On such a subject they are competent to give 
testimony. For, if the whole creation groans, and travails, 
and is in pain for the adoption ; for the redemption of 
the body ; when the adoption comes, when a man be- 
comes a child of God ; when the redemption comes, when 
a woman is redeemed from the dominion of sin, the bur- 
den of the penalty of sin is sure to sit lighter upon crea- 
tion ; upon four-footed beasts and creeping things ; so 
that everything that hath breath will praise the Lord ! 



78 BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 

There are burdens which have been taken upon them- 
selves by those engaged in trying to save lost women 
and lost men, which do not belong to them. I mean by 
this, that if every man and every woman who is tempted, 
should be true to the instinct which God has implanted 
in them ; should resist the evil that is suggested ; should 
say to the Tempter, not what our first mother did when 
he came to parley with her over God's commandments in 
Eden, but what the second Adam said to Peter : " Get 
thee behind me, Satan !" a large class of men and women 
who are now engaged in humanitarian and Christian 
work, would be at liberty to undertake something else ; 
I mean work in some other department. Did you ever 
think, my brother, not alone that you were dishonoring 
God, and grieving your wife, and offending God's little 
people, your children, but that you are actually hanging 
like a weight about the neck of humanity itself; that you 
obstruct the progress of Christendom ; that you exhaust 
upon yourself attentions, and prayers, and exertions, and 
gifts which really belong to some specimens of humanity, 
whom God has never so richly endowed, as He has en- 
dowed yourself? When He made you, He said : " Let 
us make a man!" He did not intend you to be like 
drift-weed, 

" Flung from the rock, on ocean's foam to sail, 

Where'er the surge may sweep, the tempest's breath prevail." 

Ah ! I tell you, if the men who could be men, would be 
true men ; and the women who could be women, would 
be true women, something could be done by their help 
for a grade of tempted ones whose lot is less sufferable 
than their own. We can not get down lower till we get 



BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 79 

past them. And here you are tumbling back into the 
surf from which kind hands have 'taken you, to receive 
their attentions again, while hundreds are yet clinging 
to the wreck, and can not reach the shore. Ah ! be the 
man that God would have you, and plunge into the surf 
and buffet the waters for others ! 

III. The law of Christ is not only that for His sake, and 
for our own sake, and for the sake of others, we should 
bear our own burdens, but that for His sake, and our 
own sake, and for the sake of others, we should bear the 
burdens of other men. And the best preparation to do 
the last, is to do the first. No one can be a burden - 
bearer for others, who will not bear his own burdens. 
We natter ourselves we can ; but it is a delusion. Even 
Christ pleased not himself. He had to become poor be- 
fore He could make others rich. He had to have noth- 
ing before He could make others possessors of all things. 
He had to take up His cross and bear it, ay, and hang 
upon it, before He could see the travail of His soul in 
the salvation of others. It is enough for the disciple that 
he be as his Lord ; and the servant that he be as his 
Master. 

The Apostle says : " Bear ye one another's burdens, 
and so fulfill the law of Christ." There is a law here. 
It is not a question of convenience or privilege. It is a 
law. Every plant grows after a law of its kind. Every 
plant that our Father has planted after this law. I have 
seen people come into the church of God, and look 
around, and wonder why the whole membership did not 
rush to their feet with gold, frankincense and myrrh, to 
minister to them. That is not the law of Christ. He 
came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and 



t 

SO BEARING ONE ANOTHER^ BURDENS. 

give His life a ransom for many. It was only in His 
cradle that such offerings were brought Him. And it is 
proof that we are still in ours, if we expect them. I have 
seen other people come into the church just as the true 
patriot enlists ; to find some position of service ; some 
systematic service. And all around them from that sa- 
cred hour, the life of others was like the greenness of an 
oasis in the desert because of them. There was not a 
sick man, or sick woman, or sick child ; there was not a 
case of affliction, or temptation, but they seemed to know 
it, as if by instinct/ Their very horses seemed to be 
more familiar with the walks of the children of sorrow, 
than the avenues where most the pleasure -seekers did 
congregate. 

Twenty-one of the twenty-seven verses of the last 
chapter in the epistle to the Romans, are taken up with 
personal salutations which the Apostle Paul sends to his 
fellow-laborers in the Lord ; to people who had come 
under this new law of the Master, that we bear each 
other's burdens. Take the first two verses : " I commend 
unto you Phoebe, our sister, which is a servant of the 
church, which is at Cenchrea ; that ye receive her in the 
Lord, as becometh saints ; and that ye assist her in what- 
ever business she hath need of you ; for she hath been a 
succorer of many, and of myself also." " Phoebe, our 
sister, a servant, a deacon of the church which is at Cen- 
chrea ; a succorer of many, and of myself also." 

This quiet and unobserved ministration to the needy ; 
the original meaning of the word deacon ; this having 
an open ear to hear the tale of God's suffering poor, and 
an open hand to supply their wants ; this having willing 
feet to run on errands of mercy ; this disposition to 



BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 8 1 

make a way for the entrance of the living Christ into 
men's households through an open door, which we have 
left ajar for them, as Christian neighbors and friends ; 
this, I think, is something which we all ought to study 
more as a Christian art. Last Monday morning, a few 
of you who knew her, and loved her, followed to her 
grave, the dust of Mrs. Jenny Duncan. She was a wo- 
man like Phoebe of Cenchrea ; a woman who interpreted 
Christianity to be an angelic ministration to the wants of 
our poor humanity. You might meet her in the woman's 
meeting for prayer ; in the Gospel Temperance work ; at 
the bedside of the sick ; in front of the iron-gratings of 
the jail ; in her own home, walking together with her 
husband and her daughter who had been redeemed by 
her prayers, in the way of life ; taking as her grateful 
charge the daughter of another dying Christian sister ; on 
her own sick bed. And wherever you found her, she had 
the same desire for more likeness to her Lord ; for new 
preparation for active Christian service. And accompa- 
nied with the expectation that she was to recover, was 
the wish to recover that she might still minister to the 
necessities of others. Her record is in Heaven. She did 
what she could. It was in her heart to do more. But 
the messenger said to her : " Daughter, arise ! The Mas- 
ter has come, and calleth for thee !" 

In his works recently published, is President Garfield's 
tribute to the memory of Almeda A. Booth. No life was 
ever better fitted by suffering, to be the inspiration of 
pupils committed to her charge, than hers. Let me quote 
a few lines from President Garfield's address. " Until 
she reached the age of twenty -four, her life had been 
devoted to home-duties, to study and teaching. In the 



82 BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS, 

family of her nearest neighbor, she had formed the inti- 
mate acquaintance of Marty n Harmon, a young man of 
rare and brilliant promise. Like herself, he was an en- 
thusiastic student. Ambitious of culture, he had pushed 
his way through the studies of Meadville College, and 
was graduated with honor. He had given Almeda his 
love, and received in return the rich gift of her great 
heart. The day of their wedding had been fixed. He 
was away in Kentucky teaching ; while she was in Man- 
tua preparing to adorn and bless the home of their love. 
On the 6th of March, 1848, he died of some sudden ill- 
ness, and was buried near Frankfort, Kentucky. Funeral 
services were held in Mantua, at which Almeda took her 
place as chief mourner. Her plans of life and the hopes 
of her earthly future seemed buried in his grave. After 
such a loss, what was left to a soul like hers? To her 
heart, the consolations of the Christian faith ; and to her 
life, the power of serving and blessing others. It is one 
of the precious mysteries of sorrow, that it finds solace 
in unselfish work. Patient and uncomplaining, with a 
spirit chastened and sweetened by her great sorrow, Al- 
meda gathered up the fragments of her broken life, and 
devoted her power to the work of teaching." 

This is the key-note to the life of the woman, of whom 
President Garfield says : " On my own behalf, I take this 
occasion to say, that for her generous and powerful aid 
so often and so efficiently rendered ; for her quick and 
never failing sympathy, and for her intelligent, unselfish 
and unswerving friendship, I owe her a debt of gratitude 
and affection, for the payment of which, the longest term 
of life would have been short." Thus did this woman 
find in bearing her own burdens, the way opened to bear- 



BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 83 

ing the burdens of others, so that when she died, thou- 
sands of men and women rose up to call her blessed. 
The law of Christ is the same in your life and mine. At 
the foot of His cross we can learn the secret of living not 
to please ourselves, but to glorify the name of our Mas- 
ter ; to help others into His kingdom. Let us make 
haste to sit there ! 

The world is full of burdened ones, 
Weighed down by heavy crosses ; 
Each one to his own bosom owns 
Life's bitterness and losses : 
The tempted here, 
The poor are near : 
Without or search, or labor, 
We know who is our neighbor. 

My burdens, Lord, help me to bear, 
That I new strength may gather, 
My brother's burdens, too, to share : 
Because God is our Father. 
Let me not shirk 
Or pain, or work : 
If others are encumbered, 
With them I would be numbered. 

If brothers near we sink in death, 

With them, I'm daily dying : 
If others seek new life by faith, 
With them, to Christ I'm flying. 
Their woes are mine, 
And this the sign : 
World round, there is no other : 
Christ is our Elder Brother ! 

It is the law of Christ Himself, 

He took our woes to save us ; 
For God is love, not ease or pelf : 



BEARING ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. 



And love is what He gave us. 

Though faith be dim, 

I'll follow Him, 
Great Captain of salvation ; 
Whate'er my lot or station. 

The burden-bearer I will find, 

And try love's best to ease him : 
Seeking within, the Master's mind ; 
And hoping thus to please Him : 
That He may say, 
On that great Day, 
When He His own shall gather : 
Come, blessed of my Father! 



V. 



THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 

I Cor. xv : 45. — " And so it is written, The first man Adam was 
made a living soul : the last Adam was made a quickening spirit." 

The material origin of man, as the Bible gives it, has 
this argument in its favor : That what man was before 
God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, man be- 
comes when this breath of God is taken away. He was 
dust ; he becomes dust. God calls His spirit out of eter- 
nal silence, and gives it a body to walk about in for 
threescore years and ten. He recalls that spirit ; the 
clay-tenement crumbles to ashes, and dissolves back to 
its original elements. " Then shall the dust return to 
the earth as it was." " The first man is of the earth, 
earthy." 

It is a hard sentence, this of physical death, that passes 
upon the forms of those we love ; that they prove by 
their very dissolution and decay that they are made of 
the very constituents of the earth ; that they deserve the 
epithet Adam, red-earth, as much as the first of the series. 
God made the outer structure of the first man directly 
from the dust. He makes the outer structure of every 
succeeding man indirectly from the dust. Think of it a 
moment ! The rock melts and disintegrates under the 
weather : winter, summer, sunshine, tempest, God's ana- 



86 



THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 



lytic chemists ; and the stream glad of its mountain 
theft, bears the virgin soil upon its moving bosom to the 
plain. There the trees root, and the grass grows, and 
the cattle are fed, and man has his habitation ; and the 
earth ministers to his material life. What was once part 
of the granite-hills becomes transmuted by the alchemy 
of the first Maker of the first man, into bone of our bone, 
and flesh of our flesh ; and we are still Adam's sons and 
daughters. But these bodies which earth thus puts up 
and repairs for our temporary uses, she keeps mortgaged, 
and we are constantly paying interest on the mortgage ; 
and by and by she forecloses, she takes possession ; and 
we go back to her as to our mother. Mother-Earth ! 
Ah ! well may we call her so. Mother to the body from 
the day our little infant -lungs drink in the breath of life 
from God's great sea of life which envelopes her as an 
atmosphere, and the bystanders know that there is an- 
other son of man born into the world, to the day when 
our heads, snow-crowned or bald from the beating of 
life's tempests, are pillowed for the last sleep on her 
breast, and the bystanders know that there is another 
son of God gone home to his Father's House. " The 
dust to the earth as it was, and the spirit to God who 
gave it." Mother-Earth ! that feeds us, and clothes us, 
and finally wraps us to her bosom, and we sleep in her 
chambers. 

The subject which the text suggests, is 

THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 

And I remark, 

I. That our relation to the first Adam is something for 
which we are not accountable. It has always seemed to 



THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 



87 



me that the first Adam is a great deal more in me when 
I sin, than it was in him when he sinned. God made 
Adam a living soul ; God made Eve the mother of all 
the living. Our being at all, God has made to depend 
upon our ancestors ; upon some Adam and Eve who have 
succeeded them. So far as the Creator is concerned, He 
opens a new account with every new creature born into 
the world ; takes him as he is, and makes his best, possi- 
ble for him. It is often argued that we of this late gene- 
ration in the world's history are at great disadvantage, 
being the heirs of so much weakness and misery ; that it 
would have been better for us could we have been born 
earlier ; in Eden itself; in the times of the patriarchs ; of 
the Jewish commonwealth ; of the primitive Christian 
Church. Are we not the heirs of the wisdom of the ages? 
Are we any more fallen than Adam ? 

Being at all is wholly the work of God. He made 
the law of our being. Says Frederick William Faber : 
" Man's being born was a tremendous act ; yet it was 
not his own. It has entangled him in quantities of diffi- 
cult problems, and implicated him in numberless respon- 
sibilities. In fact, he has in him an absolute inevitable 
necessity either of endless joy or endless misery, though 
he is free to choose between the two. Annihilation he is 
not free to choose. Reach out into the oncoming Eter- 
nity as far as fancy can, there still will this man be, 
simply because he has been already born. The conse- 
quences of his birth are not only unspeakable in their 
magnitude, they are simply eternal. Yet, he was not 
consulted about his own birth. He was not offered the 
choice of being, or not being." 

The solidarity of the human race ; their having origi- 



88 



THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 



nated from a single family centre ; the constitution of 
humanity from a single head, and the power given to 
this first pair to people the earth with their descendants ; 
this is one of the fundamental truths of Revelation. The 
first Adam is as much a part of Revelation as the last. It 
used to be regarded a very arbitrary and tyrannical 
thing, that way back in those Eden-lands of being, God 
should so bind in one bundle, all humanity ; should 
make human condition and destiny so largely to hinge 
upon original parentage ; should, in the old phraseology, 
so covenant with our first parents. But the infidel phi- 
losophy of the present day binds in one bundle not only 
all humanity, but all the lower animals ; nay, all vegeta- 
ble life : starts humanity not at Adam a living soul, with 
a Creator behind him, but at Adam, red-earth : inorganic 
matter with no Creator behind it ; inorganic matter ex- 
isting from eternity ; teaches the solidarity of all organic 
life ; and self-originated at that. Infidelity that used to 
find it so hard to conceive of God's infinite attributes, 
has given them all to the senseless clod that the rude 
swain turns with his share and treads upon. 

When God called to Cain after he had taken the life 
of his brother Abel, this was his question : " What hast 
thou done?" It was not the fact, it was the measure of 
the fact which was the burden of the inquiry. The fact 
was patent enough, but not the measure of it. To take 
life ; to terminate being begun ; to rob the living of 
their power over this life ; to prevent them from shaping 
aright the life to come ; to lay violent hands upon a liv- 
ing soul ; this is an awful thing. But Abel's life as little 
as his death was his own act. And is not the question, 
"What hast thou done?" quite as appropriate to the 



THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 



8 9 



giving of life as the taking of it. The fact is patent 
enough ; but the measure of the fact, who can take it in 
but God Himself? " And the Lord God formed man 
out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nos- 
trils the breath of life • and man became a living soul." 
Lord of creation, and yet how dependent upon it ! At 
the mercy of the earth he treads upon. Dependent upon 
the vegetable world to get nourishment out of it for him ; 
upon the animal world for food and clothing. Incom- 
plete in everything he does, did not God direct and 
supplement it by some other department of His works. 
Planting and watering, while God only gives the increase. 
And yet having so much of God's image, so much crea- 
tive and organizing power, that wherever he goes, he 
leaves the imprint of his energy ; the impression of his 
moral character, good or bad ! 

At the birth of Cain, his mother said, " I have gotten 
a man from the Lord." There is so much of God in 
every creature of God ; such a hiding of the power of the 
Creator ; so much of good, if the creature be good ; so 
much of evil if the creature be evil, that man justifies his 
origin. Wickedness in some men, and at some periods, 
has an energy which is not of this world. Take the one 
hundred hours of the French Revolution, from Septem- 
ber 2d, to September 6th, 1792. Read from the history 
of that period. " How it was, and went, what part might 
be premeditated, what was improvised and accidental, 
man will never know till the great Day of Judgment 
make it known. In this Paris there are as wicked men 
as exist in all the earth ; to be hired and set on ; to set 
on of their own accord, unhired. From the purpose of 
crime to the act of crime there is an abyss ; wonderful 



90 THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 

to think of. The finger lies on the pistol ; but the man 
is not yet a murderer. Nay, his whole nature staggering 
at such consummation, is there not a confused pause, 
rather one last instant of possibility for him ? Not yet a 
murderer ! It is at the mercy of light trifles whether the 
most fixed idea may not yet become unfixed. One slight 
twitch of the muscle, the death-flash bursts ; and he is it, 
and will for eternity be it ; and earth has become a penal 
Tartarus for him ; his horizon girdled now, not with 
golden hope, but with red flames of remorse ; voices from 
the depths of nature sounding " Woe ! woe on him !" Of 
such stuff are we all made ; on such powder-mines of bot- 
tomless guilt and criminality ; if God restrained not, as 
is well said, does the purest of us walk. There are depths 
in man that go to the length of lowest Hell, as there are 
heights which reach highest Heaven ; for, are not both 
Heaven and Hell made out of him, made by him, ever- 
lasting miracle and mystery as he is?" 

This alternative is before every creature born in the 
image of the first Adam ; to make for himself a Heaven 
or a Hell. This inheritance, being gives to us all who 
have descended from the first Adam. We hear a great 
deal about the progress of civilization. What do we 
mean ? Men do not indeed cease to wage war with each 
other ; to take each other's lives. But they nurse each 
other's wounded ; they protect the women and children ; 
they even perfect weapons to make the work of destruc- 
tion as immediate and complete as possible ; they shoot 
each other quick. Civilization applies to laws, manners, 
institutions. Christianity has introduced new ideals among 
men. These new ideals affect and modify human life. 
They relate to the care for the weakest ; whether among 



THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 



9 I 



men or nS-tions ; to the responsibility of the well-to-do, 
for the ill-to-do ; to humanity, to children, prisoners, 
the sick, even the brutes that perish ; in a word, spring 
from the application of the golden rule to men's dealings 
one with another, so far as these can be controlled by 
outward safeguards. This we call the progress of civiliza- 
tion. But does civilization affect the kind of man that 
is born into this world ? Does not the first Adam still 
beget sons in his own image ? Is the man of the nine- 
teenth century any different from the immediate children 
of Adam and Eve? In outward things, he is. Before 
the abolition of the trade in slaves ; before slavers were 
driven from the high seas, what would the recent open- 
ing of the great African Continent mean ? Merely the 
enlargement of the great slave -producing territories of 
the world. To the commercial world, now, it means 
the enlargement of the area of the earth's surface which 
can be devoted to productions in which men legitimately 
traffic. Men no longer sell each other. Christianity, 
the Christian nations, have driven slavery to the moles 
and bats of the kingdom of darkness. Did you ever 
think how largely David Livingstone represented, not 
only the kingdom of his Master and Lord, but civiliza- 
tion itself? He had a Bible ; but he had his theodolite, 
his telescope, his microscope as well. At his rude cart 
he led in triumph, on that lone progress of his, all the 
genii of all the arts and sciences. He represented the 
geographer, the geologist, the astronomer, the botanist, 
the physician, the mercantile explorer. Civilization is 
working in all these directions. And this is what the 
opening of Africa means to the world. 

Take such a book as Draper's Intellectual Development 



9 2 



THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 



of Europe ; begin with the middle ages and cdme down 
to our own time. What a change ! Think of man as he 
was before the Reformation ; before maritime discover- 
ies ; before the invention of the telescope, of printing ; 
before he knew that the earth was not the centre of the 
solar system ; think of him now ; every nation a brother- 
nation ; every man a brother-man. This is what Draper 
calls the progress of civilization ; the intellectual devel- 
opment of humanity. But mark this, that while man 
knows so much more about all material things ; is so 
much better provided for, as to the comforts and luxuries, 
has feathered his nest from all countries, he is still the 
same child of Adam that he was before the flood. In 
whatever latitude, of whatever complexion, you recog- 
nize him every time. 

The reason the Bible holds its place among men is 
because it describes men, not in their external appear- 
ance, not in their habitations and manners ; not in any- 
thing that is ephemeral or transitory, but in those par- 
ticulars in which they have always been alike from the 
beginning of time ; in which they will always be alike 
to the end of time. " As face answers to face in water, 
so the heart of man to man." Show a Hindoo, a Lap- 
lander, a Hottentot, a Greek, a Roman, an Englishman, 
not the face, the costume, the dwelling, but the heart of 
Jacob, or Joseph ; of David, or Daniel ; of Peter or John, 
and you have fascinated him at once. That heart an- 
swers to his heart, and holds him. He knows him to be 
a brother-man from what he knows of himself. 

The test of what civilization does, is to be applied 
right here. The race has made great material conquests. 
But man remains the same. He is the same he was in 



THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 



93 



Shakespeare's time. Shakespeare delineated men from 
what he knew of man. Let those whose theories lead 
them to believe that humanity has become different from 
what it was when this was written : " There is none 
righteous, no not one ; there is none that understandeth : 
there is none that seeketh after God ; they are all gone 
out of the way ; they are altogether unprofitable ; there 
is none that doeth good, no not one ; their throat is an 
open sepulchre ; with their tongues have they used de- 
ceit ; the poison ot asps is under their lips ; whose mouth 
is full of cursing and bitterness ; their feet are swift to 
shed blood ; destruction and misery are in their ways ; 
and the way of peace have they not known ; there is no 
fear of God before their eyes;" let them, I say, intro- 
duce their artificial characters, their puppets of panto- 
mime, their imaginary man and woman into the drama, 
and humanity would repudiate them as unnatural. They 
want the real Lady Macbeth, the real Iago, the real Ham- 
let's uncle. They are the true sons and daughters of Adam, 
as the pen of inspiration delineated them, these that figure 
in dramas and poems and romances. 

The fascination of the drama is, that it takes a single 
human passion, common to the whole human family ; 
that we feel is a part of us, and puts it in the focus of 
strong light and holds it up to us as in a mirror. As 
Shakespeare expresses it : it " holds, as it were, the mirror 
up to nature ; shows virtue her own feature ; scorn her 
own image ; and the very age and body of the time, his 
form and pressure." The true drama does not put any- 
thing into man which is not already there. If it is at- 
tempted we repudiate it. The French Revolution did 
not put anything into humanity which was not already 



94 



THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 



there. Those hundred hours of terror, when man's pas- 
sions became volcanic, and burst all natural restraints, 
and the streets of Paris flowed with blood, and men and 
women seemed more like fiends than human beings ; only 
revealed what is potential in human nature ; what lies 
coiled up in snaky folds in the best of us, if the restraints 
of man and God be taken off. And the test which we 
apply both to the drama and to history, shows that we 
believe humanity fallen ; liable to be overtaken by 
temptations ; capable of doing the very things that Lady 
Macbeth did ; that Iago did ; that Othello did ; that 
make bloody the very ink with which history is written ; 
ay, with which the occurrences of daily life are recorded. 

I do not care what you call this tendency to evil. If 
you admit the tendency ; that you and I and all hu- 
manity are involved in it ; that it comes to us by natural 
inheritance ; that as you have inherited it from your fa- 
ther, so you are certain to transmit it to your child ; if 
you admit our relation to the First Adam, I want 

II. To call your attention to our relation to the Last 
Adam. This is voluntary. This is something over which 
you and I have control. Our first birth from Adam we 
could not help. We have been launched upon this sea of 
being with all the uncertainties of the voyage before us ; 
most of us, indeed, in Christian homes, and with the bene- 
dictions of those who love God and us. It is true, we may 
turn around upon the constitution of humanity which binds 
us to the first Adam, and gnaw it as the viper in the fable 
gnawed the file. We may say that such a constitution of 
things is unworthy of any Creator ; that if there be such 
a constitution of things, then we absolutely disbelieve in 
a Creator ; repudiate Him. This a great many people 



THE FIRST AND THE LAST ^DAM. 



95 



do. That is, finding themselves launched without their 
will upon this voyage of life, they determine to let the 
winds and waves take control of their bark, and let it 
drift where it will ; not to consult the heavens as to their 
proper direction ; not to take the wheel in hand and 
seek to enter the true haven of blessedness and rest, but 
to drift wherever they may, though it be to perdition. 

I admit the seriousness of the situation ; I admit that 
there are some great mysteries in it ; but there are mys- 
teries everywhere. And I find it easier to believe in a 
God, than to believe in no God. Without a God the 
mysteries are greater, and there is no alternative for 
them. The more life seems a wilderness to be trodden by 
me alone, the more I feel the need of One, who though 
He does not explain all things, does explain some things ; 
and in whose satisfactory explanation of all things I can 
trust. " The first Adam was made a living soul." Out 
of this Adam I sprang. I bear his image. I inherit his 
alienation from God. To-day this alienation is my own 
choice ; is a habit, and this is my work. The moment 
this ceases to be voluntary, another Adam rises to my 
view ; the Head of a New Race. " The Last Adam was 
a quickening spirit." I am urged to transfer my relation 
from the First Adam to the Second. This is the burden 
of the Bible. This is the way the case stands. I see my 
relation to the first Adam ; I am swept along with hu- 
manity as by a mighty current. The things I would, I 
do not ; the things I would not, those I do. This pic- 
ture of humanity which the Bible records ; which profane 
history records ; which the daily Journals record ; which 
is the only one recognized as genuine by art itself ; I say 
to myself : " This is the humanity of which lam part. 



9 6 



THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 



I am not in sympathy with it. I may not be able to 
prevent other men from going wrong ; but I can cease 
to go wrong myself. I can not make other men prayer- 
ful and godly, but I can become prayerful and godly 
myself. If humanity is made up of an aggregate of 
units, I can make one unit less in the aggregate of evil, 
and add one more unit to the aggregate of good. Here 
is a Being, who if I link myself to Him by repentance 
and faith, will be within me a quickening Spirit ; will 
change the tendency of my nature which I inherit ; will 
restrain that power toward evil which I see breaking out 
in other men, and know to be in myself ; will soothe me 
in my sorrows ; will be a Friend sticking closer than a 
brother." And I hesitate. My relation to Him thus 
far has been one of voluntary distance. He has said : 
" Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, 
and I will give you rest." And I have said in my in- 
most soul, " I never will do that until I understand the 
justice of my being made to descend from Adam ; I never 
will do that until it is explained to me why the Christian 
Era did not begin with Moses, with Abraham, with Adam 
himself ; why this long, painful process of reaching so 
important a truth as Christianity." 

Here we begin to see just how far our relation to the 
first Adam is involuntary. It is involuntary in so far as 
we derive our being from him as the father of all living ; 
it is involuntary in so far as we inherit the tendency to 
wrong-doing ; which characterizes the whole race. But 
the moment we choose it as compared with any other 
relation, as compared with relation to the Last Adam, 
it is voluntary. If I say, " I will understand all mysteries 
and knowledge ; if I who breathe mysteries in my every 



THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 



97 



breath, and eat mysieries in my daily bread, and drink 
mysteries out of the mountain-brook which purls in the 
meadow ; who see mysteries in the fields where feed the 
cattle, and in the stream where the side of the trout 
gleams ; in the earth around me, and the heavens above 
me : if I who am a mystery to myself, and live among 
beings who are a mystery to themselves ; if I who take 
the mysteries of this mortal life as incidental to it, with- 
out insisting upon a solution of them ; if I say of the 
mysteries of life spiritual ; of the life which embraces the 
being and government of God, the Eternal, the Immor- 
tal, the Invisible ; these must be first solved, or I will have 
no part or lot in the matter," I show that my relation to 
the first Adam is no longer involuntary ; is my own 
chosen destiny. I show that I prefer to stand on the 
old basis. 

I have tried to put this case as strongly as language 
can put it, so far as our relation to the first Adam is a 
disability. 1 have extenuated nothing of the difficulties 
of it. If you and I had inherited the race -tendencies 
of the human family while struggling against them ; if 
they were on us as the mountains were on the giants of 
old, crushing us down ; keeping us from freedom and 
manhood as God designed it, that would be one aspect 
of the case. But it is not so. God has sent One here 
whom He calls the Last Adam. Made out of red -earth 
as we are ; as really Son of man as any of us ; but Son 
of God as well ; not merely a living soul, but a quicken- 
ing Spirit. He walks among us. We see His glory, the 
glory as of the only begotten of the Father. And He 
gives us power to break away from the old parent-stock, 
and. like Him to become the sons of God ! And we hesi- 



9 s 



THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 



tate. We want to philosophize about it ; we want to be 
taken into the eternal council-chamber, and have the 
whole economy of God's moral government explained ; 
and then we will see. 

The progress of civilization, as we term it, but really 
the progress of the race under the uplifting power of 
God's grace, as seen in the God-man; through the power 
of the Christ-idea ; the progress of civilization, which, 
however, accounted for, is always in some close way as- 
sociated with Christianity, is only an incident of it. It 
is the indirect fruit of its work ; like the wake of a vessel 
when the vessel with her precious freight has gone out 
of sight. Turn away from what Christianity has done 
on a large scale ; look at what you have seen of it in 
your own homes. It comes to you as a remedy, not as 
a philosophy. It comes to you as embodying great facts 
in which you are vitally interested. Your relation to the 
first Adam through your immediate progenitors, you 
admit. You have taken from them that which it was ac- 
cording to God's law in material things that they should 
transmit ; likeness of form, feature, intellectual qualities, 
moral qualities ; existence that will never end. Some of 
them have walked with God ; have been quickened by 
the power of the Last Adam. If a father, you could say 
as Carlyle said of his father : " His death was unexpected ? 
Not so. Every morning and evening, for perhaps, sixty 
years, he had prayed to the great Father in words which 
I shall now no more hear him expressively pronounce : 
< Prepare us for those solemn events, death, judgment, 
eternity.' " You came and went. Unstable as water in 
your faith, driven to and fro and tossed ; he serenely 
lived his life through, like Enoch, walking with God un- 



THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 



99 



til he was not, because God took him. You owe him 
existence ; you owe him more. You owe him one of 
the strongest proofs of the truth of Christianity. God 
has made him a pillar in His Temple. Stand there at his 
grave as you go home among your native hills where he 
lies buried, beside his loved ones and your loved ones ; 
gathered into death's fellowship with his fathers ; his face 
toward the East, that he may catch there the first light 
of the coming of his Lord. Commune there with your 
own heart and be still. Do you any more doubt that 
"blessed are the dead who die in the Lord?" Do you 
any more doubt whether your father's sense of God's 
presence was real or only a delusion ? do you any more 
doubt the immortality of the soul? do you any more 
doubt that this man of natural descent by the First, be- 
came by the new birth, the son of the Last Adam ? be- 
came a son of God ? 

The life of a good man, who gave testimony to the 
realities of religion, is not indeed of any private interpre- 
tation. It is one of the triumphs of God's grace, and 
belongs to the annals of the Church Universal. But 
though not limited to those who spring from him by 
natural descent, it is especially addressed to them. That 
your ancestor had in him the tendencies and character- 
istics of the first Adam, was, at first involuntary ; was 
next a matter of indifference ; became at length a mat- 
ter of anxiety and alarm ; until taking the proffered grace 
of God in Christ Jesus, he broke away from that line of 
descent, and was born again ; and this, as he believed, 
and as you believe, was the secret of his life of commun- 
ion with God. And this is the Gospel of this man's life. 
Out of his loins you sprang : he bore you in his arms 



IOO THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 

when you were taken to God's altar and dedicated to 
the Lord; he fed you and clotied you; he gave you 
your education ; there was not a day of all his mortal 
life that he did not pray for you. And when at last it 
was said of him as of another : " The prayers of David, 
the son of Jesse are ended," there went out of the holy 
forces of your life, that which you can never recover. It 
is a great thing to have a praying father stand between 
us and the possible shipwreck which we may make of 
life. There are no more letters coming to you with the 
old familiar post-mark ; written in the awkward, con- 
strained, but unmistakable hand ; no more counsels ; no 
more prayers. This man, a son of the first Adam, like 
yourself, took all the disabilities of natural descent, as 
they are in creation ; met all life's responsibilities, and 
as you believe, now stands in the presence of the re- 
deemed. " Instead of the fathers, are the children." 
The same problems, the same duties, the same possibili- 
ties are before us which were before them. Shall we do 
as they did ? Shall we receive power to become the sons 
of God ? Or, shall we drift to and fro, and pass away ? 

" And so it is written, The first man Adam was made 
a living soul ; the last Adam was made a quickening 
Spirit." Between these two Adams you and I stand. 
If our relation to the first Adam is involuntary ; if it in- 
volves us in that from which we would escape ; let us 
seek the quickening power of the last Adam. From the 
first Adam, we take the sentence : " In the day thou eat- 
est thereof, thou shalt surely die." " So death has passed 
upon all men, in that all have sinned." Physical death 
we can not escape, but we can escape its sting. We can 
take refuge in Him who has tasted death for us ; and 



THE FIRST AND THE LAST ADAM. 



IOI 



who has said, " He that believeth in me, though he were 
dead, yet shall he live. And he that liveth and believeth 
in me, shall never die." 

" Thou who did'st make, and know'st whereof wer'e made, 
O bear in mind our dust and nothingness ! 
Our wordless, tearless, dumbness of distress : 

Bear thou in mind the burden thou hast laid 

Upon us, and our feebleness unstayed 

Except thou stay us. For, the long, long race 
Which stretches far and far before our face, 

Thou know'st. Remember thou whereof we're made. 

If making makes us thine, then thine we are ; 
And if redemption, we are twice thine own : 

If, once thou did'st come down from Heav'n afar 

To seek us, and to find us : how not save ? 
Comfort us, save us, leave us not alone, 

Thou who did'st die our death, and fill our grave." 



VI. 



THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL 
HUMANITY. 

Acts xvii : 26. — " And hath made of one blood all nations of 
men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth ; and hath determined 
the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation." 

There is nothing that the Bible holds to more tena- 
ciously than the unity of the human family. It is like 
the unity of God ; a fundamental doctrine. As there 
is but one God, so there is but one man, made in the 
image of God. A few years ago the popular view of 
modern science was, that man could not have originated 
from one parent-centre ; that the difference in complex- 
ion, hair, shape of the skull, conformation of the pelvis, 
and the character of the languages proves this. And so 
we had the' white and the black, the yellow and the red ; 
we had the straight -haired, and the crisp-haired ; the 
high-skull, the broad-skull, and the long -skull ; the 
straight-nose and the flat-nose as the standards of classi- 
fication. In their Types of Mankind, Nott and Glyddon 
insisted that there must bave been, at least, eight differ- 
ent centres of origin or creation, constituting as many 
different species, fundamentally distinct, both in body, 
mind and soul. The statement of inspiration in the 



104 THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. 

Bible went for nothing. Let the Bible get out of the 
way or be run over. But what do we see now ? What 
reading this of a half-generation ago ! A man arises 
with the speculation that humanity itself has sprung from 
protoplasm ; has evolved itself up through ages of ape-life 
and monkey-life ; and, presto, all these unanswerable 
arguments against the unity of the human family are 
gone forever. This conjecture with gaps in it, eons on 
eons apart ; this hypothesis has answered everything. 
And modern science which never would submit to the 
dogma that the human family is one, because forsooth, it 
had such insurmountable race-difficulties, which never 
could be removed ; is now content to waive all these diffi- 
culties in favor of an uninspired and unsustained hypothe- 
sis which an eminent naturalist believes he has proved to 
be probable, by his observation of the changes wrought in 
different varieties of pigeons by inter-breeding. A few 
years ago, it was argued against the Bible statement of 
the unity of the human family, that the gulf between the 
different races was so great that it could not be bridged 
by the effect wrought by different climate, different man- 
ner of life, different circumstances. Although the same 
variations were in animals, trees, grasses, flowers, it took 
at least eight different race-centres to account for these. 
But now we are asked to believe, that the sfruggle for 
existence is sufficient to account for the change in plants 
and animals, so that they were evolved from the lowest 
order of existence to the very highest ; from protoplasm 
to the brain of the thinking man, who studies God's 
works, and thinks it no effrontery to believe that he can 
become a son of God. May we not say, " O Modern 



THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. 105 

Science, great is thy faith !" "I have not found so great 
faith, no, not in all Israel." 
The text teaches 

THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. 

" And hath made of one blood all nations of men." 

How very shallow the physiology of the students of 
natural science who have tried to classify the different 
races of mankind according to some outward peculiarity, 
such as the hair, the nose, the skull, the body. The 
Bible teaches what microscopic studies of the latest date 
but corroborates : that the life of man is in the blood ; 
that in the blood is going on that wondrous process at 
the loom of our being, by which the anatomy and physi- 
ology of the human body are woven ; are maintained ; 
are repaired against wear and waste ; are developed from 
the germinal form, in which yet all our members are 
written, to the fullness of the stature of the perfect man. 
The blood is the laboratory where the unseen Workman 
sits, who first breathed into man's nostrils the breath of 
life, and he became a living soul. In the blood is the 
body's life. Reduce the blood, you reduce the body's 
life. Poison the blood, you poison the body's life. 
Take away the blood, and you take away the life. 

Says Delitzsch, in his system of Biblical Psychology : 
" The blood is not only the all-conditioning basis, but 
also the all-embracing source of physical life. Scripture 
expresses itself on this point as decidedly as possible, 
(certainly without purposing to give us physiological in- 
formation,) when in Acts 17:26, it says that God has 
made of one blood all nations of men, to dwell on all 
the face of the earth \ and in John 1:13, when it says, 



106 THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. 

that man by nature is born of blood. The blood is there 
plainly considered as the original material, and as it were 
the chaos from which the whole human organism pro- 
ceeds. This view, moreover, is scientifically confirmed ; 
for it is generally acknowledged, that from the point at 
which in the embryo, the nervous marrow and blood have 
come into existence, all further secretion and formation 
arises from the blood ; and that even after birth, in every 
body endowed with soul, all the material for growth, that 
is, for all sorts of nourishment as well as for secretion, 
proceeds from the blood. The same acknowledgment, 
not as yet scientifically stated, lies at the basis of the 
Biblical prohibition of the eating of blood. The blood 
is thus stringently forbidden, because it is the substantial 
centre whence the animal life in all its forms is radiated 
into development. Everything fluid and firm, which in 
the body endowed with soul separates itself by way of 
assimilation or secretion, exists already either as a pro- 
duct, or else potentially in the blood. The immanence 
of the soul in the body is thus physically regarded no 
where so intensive as in the blood. The blood is the 
soul, not only as the principle of bodily life, but also as 
the principle of bodily formation in its sensible mani- 
festation." And so also, Roesch, in his work on " The 
meaning of Blood : " The blood as the primitive fluid, is 
a homogeneous liquid, which notwithstanding contains 
all differences, whereby it is possible that even the most 
different things can be formed from it, and be nourished 
from it ; depositing this in one place and that in another ; 
and thus it is dispersed, as the light is broken up into 
colors." And this certainly gives great force to the 
words ot the Saviour : " Except ye drink the blood of 



THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. 107 

the Son of Man, ye have no life in you. Whoso drink- 
eth my blood, hath eternal life." The blood is the life 
of the natural man ; the blood is the life also of the spir- 
itual man. In one man, the life of Jesus puts on this 
grace, in another, the other. 

But it is not of one blood physiologically that the 
Apostle speaks. He is laying the foundation for some- 
thing higher. The Jews had a race-prejudice ; but no 
less the Greeks. To the Jews the Greeks were barbarians ; 
to the Greeks the Jews. Indeed, it had been the policy 
of Mosaic institutions to insulate the Hebrews from all 
other nations. This was done, just as God in Nature 
protects precious seeds with barbed points and husks dif- 
ficult to burst, until the fullness of time. Michaelis says, 
"If the regulations laid down by Moses had little ten- 
dency to draw strangers into the land, they were admi- 
rably calculated to prevent any Israelite from being lost 
to the State by settling in a foreign country. This he 
could never do without a certain loss, to submit to which 
he must have been tempted to very advantageous offers 
abroad ; for every Israelite had his hereditary land, which 
he could not sell in perpetuity, and which, of course, by 
ceasing to be an Israelite citizen, he forfeited. Besides, 
their whole plan of life was so regulated that they could 
not have much intercourse with other nations ; and many 
of their customs, which were converted into laws, were 
so contrary to the customs of foreign nations, as effectu- 
ally to prevent any intimate connection with them. 
Moses was no less careful to guard against the danger of 
the Israelitish state ever becoming dependent on any 
foreign nation. He had confined it within certain dis- 
tinct boundaries, with a view to prevent any foreign 



I08 THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. 

conqueror from having any pretext to annex it to his 
conquests ; and he had, moreover, expressly interdicted 
the people from ever choosing a foreigner to be their 
king." 

The best summary of the intense Hebraism of the 
Jews is given us by the Apostle Paul himself. It is in 
his epistle to the Christians at the political capital of the 
proudest and noblest pagan nation then upon the face of 
the earth ; to the nation of Caesar and Cicero ; of Horace 
and Sallust : "Who are Israelites; to whom pertained 
the adoption and the glory, and the covenant, and the 
giving of the law, and the service of God, and the prom- 
ises ; whose are the fathers, and of whom, as concerning 
the flesh, Christ came ; who is over all, God blessed 
forever, Amen." Here is a record which might well 
tempt a nation to exclusiveness. The living God had 
chosen them to be His peculiar people. He had chosen 
them as the depositary of the seed-idea in religion which 
all the rest of the world needed to have ; which all the 
world were to know through them. And in the incarnation 
this seed-idea cast off its hirsute covering, burst its old 
bigoted shell, and was recognized as no longer for any 
one nation, but for all nations ; since the Man of Naza- 
reth has the common blood of humanity coursing through 
his veins ; since He is the Son of Man. And here stand- 
ing among the descendants of the other noble nation of 
antiquity, to which in art all the future was to owe so 
much ; the Apostle, a Jew by birth, a Roman by privi- 
lege, teaches the universal brotherhood of mankind, as 
the offspring of one Eternal Father. 

This brotherhood is not to be sought in the complex- 
ion, in the features, in the anatomical structure ; though 



THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. IO9 

It is to be found even there. It is to be sought first in 
the susceptibility to intellectual improvement. You can 
teach some of the lower animals a great many interesting 
things. There is a kind of thinking power in the bird, 
the horse, the dog, and even in the hog. But how much 
this is the result of habit, of necessary automatic action 
it is difficult to tell. When the Newfoundland plunges 
in and saves the drowning child ; when the horse kneels 
for his mistress to mount and dismount ; when the learned 
pig picks out numbers which are the solution of some 
erudite mathematical problem, such as that two and two 
make four, we know that they have gone just as far as they 
can. They have no capacity for intellectual development. 
But the moment you strike a human being, even such a 
degraded creature, as Shakespeare represents in his Cali- 
ban, he can be taught how to name the bigger light, and 
how the less ; how to give up his unmeaning gabble for 
intelligent speech ; how to do the lower offices of human 
toil. You can build him up, generation after generation 
until he shall walk in the clearer light, and breathe the 
purer air of a higher civilization. This susceptibility of 
mental culture and advancement belongs only to man. 
The moment you find it, whatever the complexion, the 
features, the figure, you find a man made in the image of 
God. This differentiates him from all that is beneath 
him ; this links him to all that is above ; even to the 
Creator himself. 

It is a singular fact, and shows how superficial our 
judgment in such matters ; how much race -bigotry dis- 
tinguishes the Anglo-Saxons as well as the Jews ; that it 
is very hard for us to appreciate how the Chinese, who 
wear wooden shoes, and loose gowns, and long queues, 



IIO THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. 

can be as intelligent in all matters studied in schools 
and colleges as Americans. While the truth is, that they 
usually get all the prizes, even when their text-books are 
in a foreign language, and they are taught by Professors 
who are foreigners. And the old argument against the 
Africans as actually belonging to the one human race, of 
which the Anglo-Saxons claim to be the highest type, 
and the North American Indian as capable of being any- 
thing better than the wild men their fathers were, has 
always been, that with both of these abused and despised 
races, there is a similar limit to their power of progress, 
as to that of the dog and the horse. That even the 
Creator has said, "Thus far, and no farther." How 
many times have we heard the question, " Well, do you 
really think the representatives of these races are suscep- 
tible of the largest intellectual culture ?" It is not a 
great many years back to the period when all over this 
country there were learned statesmen and divines who 
argued that the best condition of the Africans was that 
of servitude ; because, forsooth, they were not capable 
of those great powers requisite to a suitable care for them- 
selves. They could nurse and bring up white children, 
but they could not nurse and bring up their own. They 
could do field work for two races, but not for one. Even 
so great a man as John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina, 
when Secretary of State, wrote a State Paper to the Brit- 
ish Government, urging that in this country, at least, the 
African was better off when a slave, than when free. 

In one of his letters home to his daughter Agnes, 
Livingstone describes a young gorilla, which an African 
chief had presented to him : " She sits crouching, eigh- 
teen inches high, and is the most intelligent and least 



THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. Ill 

mischievous of all the monkeys I have seen. She holds 
out her hand to be lifted and carried, and if refused, 
makes her face as in a bitter human weeping, and wrings 
her hands quite humanly, sometimes adding a foot or a 
third hand to make the appeal more touching. She 
knew me at once as a friend, and when plagued by any 
one always placed her back to me for safety ; came and 
sat on my mat ; decently made a nest of grass and leaves, 
and covered herself with the mat to sleep. I can not 
take her with me, though I fear she will die from people 
plaguing her, before my return. I am mobbed enough 
alone — two sokos, she and I — would not have got breath." 
Now no intelligent person believes that whatever such 
a creature may learn by imitation, she has that kind of 
intelligence by which she may pass over the gulf between 
herself and humanity. Think of the difference between 
that man Livingstone, nay, the humblest of the residents 
of that dark continent and this poor monkey, and then 
reflect, that it is the wisest guess of modern science that 
man who has filled the earth with his books and his 
monuments, had such an origin ! To my mind, the 
strongest argument for this is the hypothesis itself. "It 
is a long way," says Mr. Emerson, " from the gorilla to 
the gentleman ; from the gorilla to Plato, Newton, 
Shakespeare ; to the sanctities of religion, to the refine- 
ments of legislation, to the summits of science, art, 
poetry." 

But intelligence is not the highest faculty in man ; 
though it is a faculty which separates him forever from the 
brute creation. The gorilla never can think herself into 
being human, because Darwin's pigeons could be so 
crossed as to make fan-tails, feathered -feet, pouters. Be- 



112 THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. 

tween her and humanity there is a great gulf fixed ; so 
that there is no passing backward and forth. And no 
man endowed with intelligence can get rid of the respon- 
sibilty of being a thinking being ; can think himself back 
to his hypothecated ape -ancestors, and thus escape ac- 
countability to God. But there is another faculty which 
belongs to man that is, if possible, more human than in- 
telligence. I mean moral sense ; the power to discern 
between good and evil ; the power, nay, the necessity to 
pass judgment between things good and evil. Because 
the decision of the moral sense is dependent upon the 
degree of intelligence, there are those who do not regard 
this faculty as a very certain or commanding one. Con- 
science is like the polar needle. Clear it of all obstruc- 
tions ; liberate it from all influences which tempt it to 
deviate, and its decisions will be accurate, and according 
to the judgment of God. There are certain decisions of 
conscience which are alike the world over. Those island- 
ers who saw the viper come out of the fire and fasten on 
the hand of the Apostle Paul, said at first : " He is a 
criminal, and now God has arrested him." But when he 
shook the creature off, and had no harm, they regarded 
him not a criminal, but a favorite of Heaven. It was 
the voice of conscience. It is this conscience in man 
which makes it possible to do something for him ; some- 
thing to bring him back to God. 

Take the case of that African, who, after sitting in 
Livingstone's hut for some time in deep thought, said to 
him, addressing him with a pompous title : " I wish you 
would change my heart ! Give me medicine to change 
it ; for it is proud, proud and angry always." Dr. Liv- 
ingstone lifted up the Testament, and was about to tell 



THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. 113 

him of the only way in which a heart can be changed, 
but he interrupted, saying, " Nay, I wish to have it 
changed by medicine ; to drink and have it changed at 
once ; for it is always proud, and very uneasy, and con- 
tinually angry with some one." This poor heathen thus 
revealed that he belonged to the human family. And 
right in this connection, and as illustrating just what he 
meant by being cured of his bad heart by drinking 
something, how almost suggestive of the words : " He 
that drinketh my blood hath eternal life." Let me quote 
from a letter of Livingstone to Dr. Risden Bennett, 
describing what superior patients the Bechuanas are : 
"They are excellent patients. There is no wincing. 
Everything prescribed is done instanter. Their only 
failing is, that they become tired of a long course. I 
have been astonished over and over again at their calm- 
ness. In cutting out a tumor an inch in diameter, they 
sit and talk as if they felt nothing. « A man like me,' 
they say, ' never cries. They are children who cry.' " 
And it is a fact, that the men never cry. But when the 
Spirit of God works on their minds they cry most pit- 
eously. Sometimes in church they endeavor to screen 
themselves from the eyes of the preacher, by hiding un- 
der the forms, or covering their heads with their karosses, 
as a remedy against their convictions. And when they 
find that will not do, they rush out of the church and 
run with all their might, crying as if the hand of death 
were behind them. One would think when they got 
away they would not return, but there they are in their 
places at the very next meeting. It is not to be won- 
dered at that they should exhibit agitation of the body 
when the mind is affected, as they are quite unaccustomed 



114 THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. 

to restrain their feelings. But that the hardened beings 
should be moved mentally at all, is wonderful indeed. 
If you saw them in their savage state you would feel the 
force of this more." 

Moral and spiritual phenomena are just as much in the 
line of the investigation of the true philosopher as mate- 
rial ones. Here is this peculiarity of the human race 
that brings them face to face with their own wrong-doing ; 
face to face with their consciences, and with Him who is 
back of conscience with all of us ; and what then ? The 
same result every time. Self-condemnation ! You who 
study the cranial bones, and the ethnoid bone, and the 
conformation of the face, and the structure of the heel, 
and the kink of the hair, pause a moment here. Here is 
something in which man is utterly unlike dogs, horses, 
birds, gorillas, everything in creation beneath and around 
him, and always like his brother-man, the world over. 
Wrong is a possibility with him. He knows when he has 
done wrong ; he feels it in his inmost self ; it is like a 
fire in his bones ; it is as a fever in his blood ; it is as 
though the windows of his soul were draped in black till 
he is forgiven. Come, you blue-eyed, flaxen-haired 
Anglo-Saxon, you heir to all the great deeds, and great 
thoughts of mankind ; you knight-errant to avenge the 
wrongs of all the oppressed ; you apostle -of-God to the 
benighted ; come kneel here at the altar of God with 
your black-skinned, and yellow-skinned, and red-skinned 
brother-man, who comes from the East, and the West, and 
the North, and the South ; kneel here at the altar of Him 
who has made of one blood all the nations of men, for to 
dwell on all the face of the earth, and take upon your 
lips the one petition which belts the whole earth : " God 



THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. 115 

be merciful to me a sinner." Talk about eight great 
race-centres of creation necessary to account for physical 
differences. I bring you this single law of similarity and 
identity, and ask you to account for it in any other way 
than as the Bible does. There has some great catastro- 
phe befallen the human family in its race-head, and all 
round the earth, in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, in the 
polar and the tropic islands, we find the same traces of 
it. Tell me that conscience is a matter of education. It 
is an inherent faculty of the soul ; it is the mariner's 
compass of the soul, pointing ever up to God and to 
Heaven. And you find it only in man ; and you find it 
in man everywhere upon the face of the earth. " It can 
be educated?" Yes, just as you can make the mariner's 
compass more and more delicate. The difference be- 
tween the conscience of a benighted heathen and that of 
the young man of Hebrew history who said to the tempter, 
" How can I do this great wickedness and sin against 
God?" is not a difference in kind, but a difference in 
degree. 

When God walks in the trees of the Garden of Eden 
at the close of the day, and Adam hears his voice asking, 
"Where art thou?" the wise men of modern days tell 
you it is an allegory. It is no allegory. It is a fact ; an 
eternal fact ; a present fact. You and I have heard that 
voice. You and 1 have hid ourselves as Adam did ; as 
did the Bechuanas, whom Livingstone describes. There 
is not a night in which the stars come out on high ; there 
is not a tempest which gathers in the heavens, or which 
breaks in Ocean's great voice against the solid earth ; 
there is not an awakening of conscience under the chas- 
tening of God's voice, whether in Nature, in His Provi- 



Il6 THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. 

dence, or in His Word, but attests the truth of this. An 
allegory is something which suggests truth indirectly. 
But the sin of Adam in Eden suggests it directly. And 
there is not a son of Adam, nor a daughter of Eve who 
does not inwardly confess it. 

The sorrows of humanity, again, prove the unity of 
the race. The representative Man of the race was a man 
of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Jacob said of 
Benjamin, when at Joseph's suggestion, his brethren tried 
to persuade their father to let him go down with them 
into Egypt : " My son shall not go down with you, for 
his brother is dead, and he is left alone. If mischief 
befall him by the way in which ye go, then shall ye 
bring down my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave." 
It is true, that " without natural affection," is one of the 
indictments brought against heathenism. But when his 
daughter Tullia dies, the orator Cicero is inconsolable. 
Opening the life of the great commoner, Richard Cobden, 
— with John Bright, so true a friend to this nation in her 
great calamity — I read this: "At this moment, Cobden 
was stricken by one of those cruel blows from which men 
and women often recover, but after which, they are never 
again what they were before. He lost his only son, a 
boy of singular energy and promise. The boy, now fif- 
teen years old, was at school at Weinheim, about fourteen 
miles from Heidelberg. He was suddenly seized with 
an attack of scarlet fever, and died before his parents at 
home even knew that he was ill. There was nothing to 
soften the horror of the shock." This is the great states- 
man's own account of it : "I had invited Colonel Fitz- 
mayer, from the Crimea, to breakfast at nine on Thurs- 
day. When I came down from my sleeping room, I 



THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. 117 

found him and the breakfast waiting. My letters were 
lying on the table, and I apologized for opening them 
before beginning our meal ; and the third letter I found, 
informed me that my dear boy, who by the latest ac- 
counts, was described as the healthiest and strongest in 
the school, was dead and in his grave." He then had to 
ride five hours with the awful secret in his bosom, and 
dreading to meet his wife to whom he was obliged to 
communicate it. And her he found fresh from reading a 
letter which their son had written a few days before his 
death. "I have been told," says his biographer, " how 
he entered his house at night-fall, and met his wife unex- * 
pectedly on the threshhold. She uttered an exclamation 
as she caught his haggard and stricken face. His little 
children were making merry in the drawing-room. He 
could only creep to his room, where he sat with bent 
head, and prostrate, unstrung limbs. When the first 
hours were over, and the unhappy mother realized what 
had befallen her, she sat for many days like a statue of 
marble, neither speaking nor seeming to hear ; her eyes 
not even turning to notice her little girl, whom they 
placed upon her knee ; her hair blanching with the 
hours." And so this great commoner, during the period 
of his heaviest public duties — for it was during the Cri- 
mean War — devotes himself to nursing and comforting 
his stricken wife, who barely escaped with her life. 

Livingstone says of the grave of his wife in the heart 
of Africa : " She rests by the baobab -tree at Shupanga, 
which is sixty-feet in circumference. The men asked to 
be allowed to mount guard till we had got the grave 
built up, out of bricks dug from the old house." And a 
few days later, he writes in his Journal, " My dear, dear 



Il8 THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMAMITY. 

Mary has been a fortnight in Heaven ; absent from the 
body, present with the Lord." He had written in 1850, 
ten years earlier : " Our last child, a sweet little girl with 
blue eyes was taken from us to join the company of the 
redeemed, through the merits of Him of whom she had 
never heard. It is wonderful how soon the affections 
twine around a little stranger. We felt our loss keenly. 
Previous to expiring, she uttered a piercing cry, and then 
went away to see the King in His beauty ; and the land, 
the glorious land and its inhabitants. Her's is the first 
grave in all that country marked as the resting-place of 
one, of whom it is believed and confessed, that she shall 
live again." 

Our American Bryant has said, 

" All that tread 
The globe are but a handful to the tribes, 
That slumber in its bosom." 

And all these tribes have gone down to their resting- 
places mourned by the living. Long before the death of 
Mary Moffat Livingstone or her little babe, the mourners 
for the dead were in Africa ; the same kind of sorrow 
was there, which Richard Cobden had in England ; which 
you and I have in America ; sorrow respecting the dead, 
which to the vast multitude of the human family, to all 
men out of Christ, is sorrow without hope. Shakespeare 
says that 

"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." 
These sorrows of nature make the whole world kin. A 
few days ago in this city, a man who is regarded the 
Apostle of modern infidelity, spoke these words over the 
dust of his dead friend : " Again are we face to face with 
the great mystery that shrouds the world. We question, 
but there is no reply. Out on the wide, waste seas, there 



THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. 119 

drifts no spar. Over the desert of death the sphynx gazes 
forever, but never speaks. In the very May of life an- 
other heart has ceased to beat. Night has fallen upon 
noon ; but he lived, he loved, he was loved. Wife and 
children pressed their kisses on his lips. This is enough. 
The longest life contains no more. This fills the vase of 

joy." 

Ah ! how cold and shallow and superficial and forbidding 
such a view of life ! This is in one of Livingstone's letters 
to Mary Moffat, just before their marriage : « And now 
dearest, farewell, may God bless you. Let your affection 
be toward Him, much more than toward me, and kept 
by His mighty power and grace, I hope that I shall 
never cause you to regret that you have given me a part. 
Whatever friendship we may feel toward each other, let 
us always look to Jesus as our common friend and guide. 
May He shield you in His everlasting arms, from every 
evil." And this is from one of Mary Moffat's mother's 
letters to her daughter : " Yes, I do feel solemn at death ; 
but there is no melancholy about it. For what is our 
life, so short and transient ? And seeing it is so, we 
should be happy to do and suffer as much as we can for 
Him who bought us with His own blood. Should you 
go to those wilds which God has enabled your husband 
to penetrate through numerous dangers and deaths, 
there to spend the remainder of your life, and as a con- 
sequence, there to suffer manifold privations in addition 
to the trials which you have already passed ; you will 
not think all too much, when you stand with that multi- 
tude who have washed their robes in the blood of the 
Lamb. Yet my dear Mary, while we are yet in the flesh, 
my heart will yearn over you. You are my own dear 
child, my first born." 



120 THE ONENESS OF BLOOD OF ALL HUMANITY. 

What a different plane this from that occupied by this 
Apostle of Infidelity ! Here are those, the heroes and 
heroines of humanity, who are to walk in the high places 
of earthly history through all time ; who are to walk with 
Jesus in white, through all Eternity ; and from their 
eyes, even here, the hand of their Heavenly Father wipes 
all tears ; while for them there is no dumb, silent sphynx 
gazing out over the desert of death, but a voice, " In my 
Father's house are many mansions. I go to prepare a 
place for you ; and if I go and prepare a place for you, I 
will come again to receive you unto myself, that where I 
am, there ye may be also." What they had, all men 
need ; all men may have in Christ Jesus. 

It required a vision three times let down from Heaven 
to show the Apostle Peter that salvation was for the Gen- 
tiles as well as the Jews. We need no vision other than 
that of the Son of God becoming the Son of Man ; the 
same blood coursing in His veins as in ours. In Him 
meet the wants of all nations. " As in Adam all die, so 
in Christ shall all be made alive." The cup of blessing 
which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of 
Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the com- 
munion of the body of Christ ? " Whoso eateth my flesh 
and drinketh my blood hath eternal life ; and I will 
raise him up at the last day. He that eateth my flesh 
and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me and I in Him. 
For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink in- 
deed." This is the justification of that command : " Go 
ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every 
creature." This is the Gospel which satisfies the mind 
and the heart of man ; which comforts him in sorrow, 
and opens for him beyond the valley of the shadow of 
death, the portals of Eternal Life. 



VII. 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 

John xviii : 37, 38. — " Pilate, therefore, said unto Him, Art 
thou a king then ? Jesus answered, thou sayest that I am a king. 
To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world : 
that 1 should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the 
truth heareth my voice. Pilate said, What is truth?" 

Truth might be defined to be the shortest distance 
between two points ; like the definition of a straight line 
in Geometry ; like the course that an arrow takes when 
it speeds from the thumb of some Apollo -archer. Chil- 
dren, who are of God's kingdom have a genius for truth. 
There is not a white lie ever taught us by Society which 
the arrow of artless childhood has not pierced in the 
bull's eye. There are some people who always mean to 
speak the truth. They aim at the heart of things. There 
are others who take their stand like the duellist, as 
though they meant to do bloody work, but shoot into 
the air. They are afraid the truth will hurt somebody ; 
and that they fear will be bad for the truth or for them- 
selves. 

Just as in architecture nothing can be done without 
strict regard to straight lines, so in religion nothing can 
be done without strict regard to truth. The Apostle 
says, "Yea, let God be true, and every man a liar." If 



122 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 



there is not truth in religion there is nothing there. To 
speak of it as a cunningly-devised fable is to speak of it 
too gently. If it is not true, it is worse than a fable. 
And if there is truth in it there is everything there. 
Heaven and earth shall pass away, but God's Word shall 
not pass away. God's truth will stand amid the wreck of 
worlds ; yes, and we shall stand with it. 

As between man and God the Bible reveals the truth, 
the whole truth and nothing but the truth ; shows us the 
life and death of the God man ; the shortest distance 
between these two points. " For there is one God, and 
one Mediator between God and man ; the man Christ 
Jesus." There is no roundabout method in the Bible. 
" There is only One to whom the porter openeth." As 
between the creature and the Creator, Jesus of Nazareth 
says, "I am the way; no man cometh unto the Father 
but by Me." There He stood, in the presence of the 
Roman Pilate, that Man of Sorrows and acquainted with 
grief. There was not a line of grief in His face, but the 
sin of man had graven it there. The sorrows that were 
before Him were all written in God's purpose for man's 
sake. He stood there in fulfillment of God's promise in 
Eden ; the seed of the woman about to bruise the ser- 
pent's head ; having taken on Him the seed of Abraham ; 
a partaker of our flesh and blood ; about to be lifted up 
as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness ; that 
through this lifting-up He might draw all men unto 
Himself ; that through death He might destroy him that 
had the power of death, that is the devil, and deliver 
them that through fear of death were all their lifetime 
subject to bondage." There He stood, God's way of 
bringing man back to Himself ; there He stood, the 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 



I23 



Gentile saying, " Ecce Homo!" "Behold The Man!" 
and the Jewish populace, " Haron, Haron ! Staurotheto ! 
Staurotheto !" "Away with Him ; crucify Him ! crucify 
Him !" This is the only time the truth, the whole truth 
and nothing but the truth ever appeared incarnate ; the 
only time that God ever took on our nature, and walked 
among us ; and this is the way men of like passions as 
we are treated Him. God is love; but when He came 
here He came as truth. And love always walks in this 
guise. 

The subject which I wish to lay before you this morn- 
ing is 

THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 

" Pilate therfore said unto Him, " Art thou a king then ?" 
Jesus answered, " Thou sayest that I am a king. To this 
end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, 
that I should bear witness unto the truth." 

I. I remark, that to claim that a thing is true does not 
make it true ; does not put it within the realm of truth. 
Christ Jesus has laid down the landmarks of truth. 

You know how Polonius humored Hamlet respecting 
the shape of a certain cloud which they were watching : 
" fooling him," as he says, " to the top of his bent." 
First it was like a camel, then a weasle, then a whale. 
This is the way some people think of truth ; something 
like a cloud which can be shaped into whatever they 
like ; that can be a camel, or a weasel, or a whale ; or 
whatever you please ; and so they are orthodox, or hetero- 
dox, trinitarians or unitarians as the case may be. But 
the Saviour speaks of truth as a realm of which He is 
sovereign ; 2, kingdom of which He is the king. 



124 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 



The idea of a kingdom is this : A certain territory 
under law ! In the study of medicine there is a depart- 
ment called Materia Medica. This department embraces 
the substances, mineral and vegetable, which are used in 
the treatment of disease. These substances are supposed 
to have certain properties adapted to produce certain re- 
sults. They are irritants, anodynes, astringents ; or they 
have some other quality, sought after in the physician's 
practice. We speak of these substances as belonging to 
certain kingdoms : the mineral kingdom, the vegetable 
kingdom ; that is, realms under certain material laws. 
The Saviour speaks thus of the kingdom of truth. He 
comes here to preside over, to illustrate in life, and espe- 
cially in death, a certain class of truths ; to give them 
establishment and success in the earth • to enforce them 
upon our attention, and to bring us under their sway ; so 
that we may obey them forever. For the kingdom of 
truth is not limited to time. 

The word king is rather offensive to us who select our 
own rulers • though the great empire of Russia that has 
her coronation day during these very hours, was friendly 
to us in our day of need, when Mother England let 
Rebel cruisers pluck our ships from the deep. But in 
the derivation of the office, and in its functions of king- 
ship there is something which throws light upon this 
discussion. A king represented a great public interest. 
He led armies ; won victories ; was the man whom 
emergencies put forward ; whom exigencies lifted to a 
throne. Julius Caesar was offered by Mark Antouy the 
crown of a king, and he did not refuse it as though he 
wanted to. It is the instinct of a rude but manly people 
to select their ablest man to preside over their destinies. 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 1 25 

If this nation had lived earlier in the history of the world ; 
had not been made up of men wiser than Greeks and 
Romans, had not tired of kings in the Continental con- 
dition, our Revolutionary fathers might have substituted 
Washington I, for George III. And modern French his- 
tory shows us Napoleon the soldier made Napoleon the 
Emperor ; and even the Republic of 1848 easily swung 
back to the empire by Napoleon III ; while we ourselves 
have listened to the cry of imperialism because some of 
the citizens of this nation wanted to honor again the great 
General twice before elected President, who had led our 
armies to victory over the rebellion. The king of olden 
times was not the thin -blooded, hereditary creature that 
waits for the death of his predecessor that he may put 
on an inherited crown, but the man who had led the 
people up from an old regime to a better one ; and who 
had first been crowned in the hearts of the people, before 
he was crowned in the capitol. Then, they did not cast 
shells of dynamite, but sprinkled flowers in his pathway. 
It is not hero-worship merely, that leads to this recogni- 
tion. It is a kind of acknowledgment of public need. 
"Nay, but we will have a king over us," said the chil- 
dren of Israel to Samuel ; " that we also may be like all 
the nations ; and that our king may judge us, and go 
out before us, and fight our battles." 

" We come now," says Carlyle, in his last lecture on 
heroes, " to the last form of heroism, that which we call 
kingship. The Commander over men, he to whose will 
our wills are to be subordinated ; and loyally surrender 
themselves ; and find their welfare in doing so, may be 
reckoned the most important of great men. He is prac- 
tically the summary for us, of all the various figures of 



126 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 



heroism. Priest, Teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of 
spiritual dignity we can fancy to reside in a man em- 
bodies itself here, to command over us, to furnish us with 
constant, practical teaching, to tell us for the day and 
hour what we are to do. He is called Rex, Regulator, 
Roi. Our own name is still better ; King, Koenning, 
which means Cunning, Able-Man." 

The recognition given to the Lord Jesus by those who 
do not admit the supernatural in His life, is that He had 
a genius for the intuition of moral and religious truth j that 
is, that God furnished Him to be a great Teacher, the great 
Teacher among men of such truth ; the very claim which 
He makes for Himself here. Take this, for example, 
from the essay of John Stuart Mill, on Theism : " About 
the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal 
originality combined with profundity of insight, which 
if we abandon the idle expectation of finding scientific 
precision where something very different was aimed at, 
must place the Prophet of Nazareth even in the estimate 
of those who have no belief in His inspiration, in the very 
first rank of the men of sublime genius, of whom our 
species can boast. When this pre-eminent genius is 
combined with the qualities of probably the greatest 
moral reformer and martyr to that mission who ever 
existed upon earth, religion can not be said to have 
made a bad choice in pitching on this man as the ideal 
representative and guide of humanity ; nor, even now, 
would it be easy for an unbeliever to find a better trans- 
lation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the 
concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would 
approve our life. When to this we add, that to the con- 
ception of the rational skeptic it remains a possibility 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 



127 



that Christ actually was what He supposed Himself to 
be, a man charged with a special, express and unique 
commission from God, to lead mankind to truth and 
virtue ; we may well conclude that the influences of reli- 
gion on the character which will remain after rational 
criticism has done its utmost against the evidences of 
religion, are well worth preserving ; and that what they 
lack in direct strength, as compared with those of a 
firmer belief, is more than compensated by the greater 
truth and rectitude of the morality they sanction." 

Now, I do not quote this because I care for the patron- 
age of such a man as John Stuart Mill ; though he is 
one of the great thinkers of modern times. It is because 
John Stuart Mill, purposely brought up by his father 
without any regard for the Christian religion ; a man 
who prided himself upon the severe logical processes of 
his own mind ; a man who subjected the thinking of 
other men to the same severe tests as his own, was com- 
pelled to admit that though in his conception, stripped 
of all claims to be more than a man, this Jesus of Naza- 
reth did substantiate his claims to be of such profound 
insight, such pre-eminent genius in His intuitions re- 
specting virtue and truth, that even skeptics might well 
take Him as the ideal representative and guide of hu- 
manity ; as their model in life. It is exactly what Jesus 
said to Pilate : " Thou say est that I am a king. To this 
end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world : 
That I should bear witness unto the truth." 

Theodore Parker says, " Eighteen centuries have passed 
since the tide of humanity rose so high in Jesus ; what 
man, what sect, what church has mastered His thought, 
comprehended His method, and so fully applied it to 



128 THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 

life? Let the world answer in its cry of anguish!" 
Thomas Carlyle : "Jesus of Nazareth is our divinest 
symbol. Higher has the human thought not yet reached. 
A symbol of quite perennial, infinite character, whose 
significance will ever demand to be anew inquired into, 
and anew made manifest." And Strauss himself, who 
had done so much to make the wonderful works of 
the Saviour appear like the myths of other nations, ad- 
mits of Him, that " He represents in the religious sphere, 
the highest point beyond which posterity can not go ; 
yea, whom it can not even equal, in as much as every 
one who hereafter should climb the same height, could 
only do it with the help of Jesus, who attained it. As 
little as humanity will ever be without religion, as little 
will it be without Christ ; for to have religion without 
Christ, would be as absurd as to enjoy poetry without 
regard to Homer or Shakespeare." From this class of 
thinkers let me make one more quotation. It is from 
the great German thinker Goethe : "I hold the Gospel 
to be thoroughly genuine. For there is in them the re- 
flection of a greatness which emanates from the person of 
Christ ; something as like to God as ever appeared upon 
the earth." 

This Jesus of Nazareth, then, is the acknowledged 
authority in moral and spiritual truth. According to 
these great thinkers, no man ever thought so far or so 
accurately ; and no man ever will. As to your opinion 
of God, compared with His opinion of God ; as to your 
opinion of sin and sin's consequences, compared to His, 
what is to be said ? To compare them is like comparing 
the knowledge which you or I would have of a certain 
body of water over which we were for the first time sail- 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 



129 



ing, to the knowledge of the pilot who had studied every 
foot of ground there ; who knew all its depths and shal- 
lows ; its currents and tides ; who knew the wrecks 
already gone down. 

II. I remark, that the denial of moral and spiritual 
truth affects not the realm of the truth, but the character 
and destiny of him who denies it. If we do not believe 
what is true, it is not half so bad for the truth as it is for 
ourselves. For, really, what a man believes, makes him, 
or unmakes him. 

"What is truth?" says the Roman Governor, Pilate. 
After the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth no one need 
ask this question. We may turn to them and say, This 
is truth ! It is often charged against us that our lives 
are not consistent with what we profess to believe. This 
is an admission more important than the charge : namely, 
that what a man professes to believe ought to mould his 
character and life ; that if he profess to believe in an 
endless future, to be determined by the character of the 
present life; in a day of accounts, when judgment is 
to be passed upon all men according to the deeds done 
here in the body ; if he profess to believe, that unless 
men have a knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, and be- 
lieve in Him, their future must be one of darkness and 
woe, there is certain conduct and a certain life which is 
consistent with this profession. It is true. And, though 
we can not point to the life of any mere man or woman 
and say, " Here is one whose whole life ; whose deeds, 
and words, and thoughts, and feelings were consistent 
with the belief professed," we can so point to the Man 
Christ Jesus ; we can say as Pilate did, " Ecce Homo ! 
Behold the Man!" 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 



Take any single doctrine of the Christian system ; the 
hardest for us to believe ; to make to square with our 
ideas of God's justice, or God's mercy ; and how could 
this Jesus of Nazareth have lived, taught, or died differ- 
ently, upon the supposition that it is true ? Take the 
whole group of doctrines which he taught, and apply to 
them the same test. As tried by His life and His death, 
this Jesus of Nazareth believed that God is our Father, 
and that all men are brother -creatures of God's creative 
power ; that they have lost God's fellowship and likeness, 
and that this loss never can be recovered except by taking 
Him as their crucified Saviour. And looked at a little 
more closely, this is the very function of Christ's king- 
ship as he defines it : witness-bearing to the truth ! 
" Thou sayest that I am a king ; to this end was I born, 
and for this cause came I into the world ; that I might 
bear witness to the truth!" His birth, His incarnation 
was for this : for this kingship over the kingdom of truth. 
And at this very point, St. Peter said of Him, that He 
witnessed a good confession. Pilate said, " Art thou a 
king?" And He said, " I am." 

There is a sense in which no man, religious or irreli- 
gious, Christian, or not Christian, is consistent with what 
he believes. Every man believes more than he lives con- 
sistently with ; the infidel quite as much as any body 
else. There are things which the most skeptical of us 
believe, with which were we consistent in thought, and 
word, and deed ; upon which were we always thinking, 
our lives would be wretched ; we could not endure them. 
Life is finite ; truth is infinite. This fact of life, whatever 
it. means to us ; this fact of death, whatever it means to 
us ; the certainty of separation from each other ; were 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 



we always letting it in upon our souls, how could a per- 
son be otherwise than what our Master was : " A Man of 
Sorrows and Acquainted With Grief?" It is all true, 
that no Christian is always consistent with what he be- 
lieves. The Apostle Paul said of his apostleship : < 1 Who 
is sufficient for these things?" Every one of us, however 
humble and secluded our lives, may say this, not of our 
work merely, but of our faith. To live the life we live ; 
so much depending on it, and growing out of it ; with 
such vistas of being before it ; to have children born to 
us, inheriting our tendencies, influenced by our example ; 
to know, that for every idle word we speak, we are to 
give account in the day of judgment ; ah ! it is a mercy 
to us that life often preoccupies us with other thoughts, 
else sometimes how could we bear to live ? And yet, as 
is the King in this kingdom, so are all the loyal citizens, 
witness-bearers ! And it is true, in some sense, of all 
Christians, as of Him for whom they are named : "To 
this end were they born, and for this cause came they 
into the world : that they should bear witness unto the 
truth!" 

This was the mystery in Christ's kingship to the mind 
of Napoleon I. He surely was not ignorant of ordinary 
king-craft. He knew how to make soldiers and citizens, 
and how to rule over them ; hero-quack although Carlyle 
has called him. And yet he says : " You speak of Caesar, 
of Alexander, of their conquests, and of the enthusiasm 
which they kindled in the breast of their soldiers. But 
can you conceive of a dead man making conquests, with 
an army faithful and intensely devoted to his memory ? 
My armies have forgotten me even while living ; as the 
Carthagenian army forgot Hannibal. Such is our power ! 



I 3 2 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 



A single battle crushes us, and adversity scatters our 
friends. Can you conceive of Caesar as the universal Em- 
peror of the Roman Senate, and from the depths of his 
mausoleum, governing the empire, watching over the 
destinies of Rome?" 

In the experience, in the person of every Christian, 
Christs puts the truth which He taught into concrete 
form ; to use John Stuart Mill's phraseology, He " trans- 
lates the rule of virtue from the abstract to the concrete." 
The man who looks at Christianity from the outside, as 
Napoleon did, does not know that every believer in Jesus 
carries about in his own being that precise truth which 
Jesus taught ; to which in the context, He is witnessing 
such a good confession. Not assurance of it merely, but 
experience of it ; that as the Apostle expresses it, He 
lives again in every other son of God ; He puts His own 
life into every new man in Christ Jesus. You remember 
that last touching appeal of President Lincoln to the 
men who were just ready to consummate their treason 
against the nation ; " The mystic chords of memory 
stretching from every battle field and patriot grave to 
every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad 
land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again 
touched, as surely they will be, by the better angel of 
our nature." Just so there is not an event in Christ's 
life, as a witness for the truth, which does not have its 
correspondence in the believer's experience ; toward 
which there are not mystic chords of memory stretching 
back. You who are not a Christian read from the Apos- 
tle's writings such expressions as "I am crucified with 
Christ ; nevertheless I live ; yet not I, but Christ liveth 
in me." "Forasmuch then, as Christ suffered for us in 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 



133 



the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind ; 
for he that hath suffered in the flesh, hath ceased from 
sin and you set them down as figurative. And when 
you read those passages where with such tenderness and 
simplicity, the Evangelist takes us to Gethsemane, and to 
Calvary, you do not understand that not only is there 
sympathy awakened with this Sufferer because He is the 
believer's Saviour, but also, because the believer is led 
along a similar pathway to Heaven ; is himself perfected 
through suffering, just as his Master was ; has the key of 
the whole of it in his own bosom. 

It was a mystery to Napoleon I. that a King who was 
dead and buried centuries ago could have this living 
sway over His followers. But did not Jesus Himself say : 
"The kingdom of God is within you?" The theology 
of Christian experience is the truest theology. It is the 
way in which the King writes the laws of His kingdom 
on the tablets of our hearts. It is the theology which is 
all the time repeating itself in the heart of the believer. 
It is the same to you and me as to St. Paul, and Luther, 
John and Melancthon. While you are studying the manu- 
scripts, and the external evidences to see whether the 
Bible is from God ; while you are balancing between 
Calvinism and Arminianism ; this Immanuel, this God 
with us, is setting up His kingdom in thousands of other 
men's hearts ; is incarnating Himself within them ; is 
bringing them into fellowship with the truth as it is in 
Himself; is repeating in their experience what might be 
called the Christian idea ; is binding them by living cor- 
respondence in their own souls, to that life, ay, to that 
death, which was His here upon earth. Is it strange that 
His kingdom is an everlasting one? Instead of com- 



134 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 



manding His followers from His tomb, He commands 
them from a throne in their own bosom. 

It is difficult to prove to some minds that Christ is 
divine ; that He has attributes which are of an infinite 
nature ; that is, if you try to demonstrate it as a theo- 
logical problem. But when He comes to us in the full- 
ness of the Godhead ; when He surrounds us with His 
presence as an atmosphere ; when we feel that we live 
and move and have our spiritual being in Him ; when 
He steals by His Spirit into our hearts as One thoroughly 
acquainted with our wants and our ways ; when He com- 
forts us in our particular sorrows as one whom a mother 
comforteth ; when He bears us up in His hands, lest we 
dash our feet against a stone, we experience the truth of 
His divinity ; then He bears witness to the truth in His 
own kingdom which is within us. It is difficult to prove 
to some minds, that they are sinners. But I have no 
doubt that the Psalmist David never uttered a truth of 
which he was more firmly convinced, than when he said : 
" Behold I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my 
mother conceive me." As Professor Park says in his 
sermon on " The Theology of the Intellect and The 
Feelings :" " This will always remain the passage for the 
outflow of his grief, whose fountains of penitence are 
broken up. The channel is worn too deep into the affec- 
tions, to be easily changed. Let the schools reason about 
it ; let them condemn it ; let them challenge its mean- 
ing ; they do not move the speaker one hair's breadth. 
He stands there where he stood before ; and where he 
will stand, until disenthralled from the body." My 
meaning is this ; " Here on my heart the burden lies ; 
and I feel that I am vile, a man of unclean lips ; and 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 



135 



that I dwell with a people of unclean lips ; and I went 
astray as soon as I was born ; and am of a perverse, re- 
bellious race ; and there is a tide swelling within me, 
and around me, and moving me on to actual transgres- 
sion, and it is stayed by none of my unaided efforts ; and 
all its billows roll over me ; and I am so troubled that I 
can not speak ; and I am not content with merely say- 
ing that I am a transgressor ; I long to heap infinite on 
infinite, and crowd together all forms of self-reproach ; 
for I am clad in sin as with a garment ; I devour it as a 
sweet morsel ; I breathe it ; I live it ; I am sin. My 
hands are stained with it, my feet are swift in it, all 
my bones are out of joint with it, my whole body is of 
tainted origin, and of death in its influence and end ; and 
here is my definition, and here is my proof; and defini- 
tion or no definition, proof or no proof, here I plant my- 
self, and here 1 stay ; for this is my feeling ; and here it 
comes up from the depths of an overflowing heart : 'Be- 
hold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother 
conceive me.' " 

Let a man with such conceptions of sin in himself; 
such self-humiliation because of it, now read the words 
of the Apostle : " For He hath made Him to be sin for 
us, who knew no sin ; that we might be made the right- 
eousness of God in Him." And again, "Who His own 
self bear our sins in His own body on the tree ; that we 
being dead to sin, should live unto righteousness ; by 
whose stripes we are healed." His conception of sin is 
experimental. His recognition of Christ is experimental. 
A great many people think that the time is coming when 
all these serious doctrines which the Saviour taught ; to 
which He gave testimony before Pontius Pilate, will be 



1 3 6 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 



dropped out of the Christian system. It never can be 
done so long as human nature is the same as now. God 
no longer writes His law on tablets of stone, but on the 
living tablets of the heart. That makes every believer a 
witness for Christ ; a living epistle known and read of 
all men. 

We sometimes sing the lines : 

" Ashamed of Jesus ! sooner far 
Let evening blush to own a star ;" 

and 

" No, when I blush, be this my shame, 
That I no more revere His name." 

Do we ever think what they mean ? In what sense, have 
we any opportunity to be ashamed of Him ? He is no 
longer here personally among men. We can no longer 
hide our faces from Him • we can no longer cry as did 
the Jews, "Not this man, but Barabbas?" "Away with 
Him ! Crucify Him !" He is no longer in Pilate's Judg- 
ment Hall, given over to the Roman Soldiers for their 
indignities ; to put on Him the purple robe ; to crown 
Him with thorns ; to smite Him with the palms of their 
hands. He is no longer here personally to be betrayed 
and denied by His own disciples. And yet he is just as 
really here as ever. His kingdom is here. His truth 
which He taught and lived ; the truth that He came forth 
from the Father, as a Daysman between us and God ; as 
a Propitiation for the sins of the world ; that He was 
born for this, and that He lived for this ; this truth which 
He attested with His own blood, is still in. the world. 
On which side of this truth do we array ourselves ? Do 
we say with the Roman Pilate : " Art thou a king then ?" 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 



137 



He has the same answer for us as for Pilate. The truth 
to which He came to bear witness is this : " That all we 
like sheep have gone astray, and on Him God has laid 
the iniquity of us all." Do we accept it ? Do we give 
it power over us ? Is it moulding us into Christ's like- 
ness ? Nothing else will ; nothing else can. If Christ is 
the Being whom humanity with one consent pronounces 
the Model-Man, we can follow in His steps, only as we 
believe what He taught ; only as we become citizens in 
that realm of truth of which He is King ; only as we die 
unto self, and live unto God. 

This is memorial week. We testify again our gratitude 
to the dead who witnessed a good confession on battle- 
field and in hospital ; whose bones lie in so many a 
National Cemetery in different parts of this great land. 
They believed in the truth for which they fought. They 
sealed it with their blood. As Christ died to make men 
holy, so they died to make men free ; while God was 
marching on. They show us the spirit in which we 
should follow our Leader ; in which we should testify to 
the truth. 

Thy kingdom is not of this world, 

Then all earth's kings are far below thee : 
Here empires are to fragments hurled ; 

Thine lives for aye, in those that know thee. 
Where is thy realm, the world are unaware, 
And who thy loyal subjects are : 

Like Pilate, " What is truth ?" still saying : 

No Judgment-Day before surveyi^ ^ 
Upon time's current onward whirled ; 
Thy kingdom is not of this world. 

Thy kingdom is not of this world ! 

The world neglect the work thou'rt doing : 



THE KINGDOM OF TRUTH. 

The Greek, with handsome lip still curled ; 

The Hebrew righteous in his ruin : 
While thee they scoff at and despise ; 
And crown their sages only wise : 

But as God's Wisdom they shall meet thee, 
And as their Judge, at last shall greet thee ; 
And own Truth's diadem impearled : 
Thy kingdom is not of this world. 

Thy kingdom is not of this world ! 

Yet endless warfare thou art waging, 
And error's flag shall yet be furled, 

And all her champions cease their raging. 
For darkness must give way to light, 
And day drive back the shades of night, ; 

And in must come through throe and anguish 

The reign for which men's hearts do languish 
And when the last foe down is hurled, 
Thy kingdom shall include this world. 



VIII. 



THE KNOWABLE THINGS OF GOD. 

Rom. i: 19. — "Because that which may be known of God is 
manifest unto them for God hath showed it unto them." 

There are certain things that may be known of God. 
These things that may be known of God make up the 
science of God : which is theology ; just as legitimate a 
science as any other. Geology is made up of what may 
be known of the earth. Directly, very little may be 
known. Our deepest mines are mere scratches on the 
earth's surface ; some three thousand feet deep ; say 
about half the height of Mt. Washington. In round 
numbers, if you should dig through the earth, as a boy 
bores a gimlet-hole through an apple, the distance would 
be about eight thousand miles. Into this eight thousand 
miles you have gone down about two-thirds of a mile, 
not enough to cover the point of the gimlet. It is true 
that volcanic upheavals show you a specimen of the 
structure of earth's deeper foundations; sample it, min- 
eralogically. But how many cubic feet of the whole of 
the vast globe which we inhabit has ever been personally 
surveyed by the eye, or measured by the hand of man. 
And yet we very complacently write our scientific books 
about the earth as though we had weighed it in our scales 



140 THE KNOW ABLE THINGS OF GOD. 

and comprehended it in our balances. We do not allow 
any man to speak disrespectfully of Geology as a science ; 
of Mineralogy, Chemistry. This is all right. 

It is very popular in some quarters to speak in a de- 
preciating way of Theology. But Theology has just as 
much right to be as any science. The principles of 
Geology are the principles relating to the structure of the 
earth, which have been derived from the facts discovered 
in the earth. Geology does not make facts ; it only re- 
cords them. Of the imperfection of these records, says 
the eminent geologist, Charles Lyell : " It is scarcely 
possible to exaggerate the defectiveness of our archives. 
In the solid frame-work of the globe, a great part of 
what remains is inaccessible to man, and even of that 
fraction which is accessible nine-tenths are to this day 
unexplored." But there is no want of facts found in 
this one-tenth which has been explored. Thirty thousand 
different species have been preserved in the rocky vaults, 
and are properly defined ; and not a single individual in a 
transition state has appeared. So far as the Earth is con- 
cerned, Darwinism has no fact in its favor. Geology re- 
cords facts, and not conjectures. And the missing link 
never has been stereotyped, because the Creator never 
issued it. 

Theology has to do with facts. It is the Science of 
God ; 

THE KNOWABLE THINGS OF GOD, 

as found out by facts. In considering these Knowable 
Things of God, I remark : 

L That God is knowable in his attributes. The flower 
is knowable in its form, its color, its fragrance. God is 



THE KNOWABLE THINGS OF GOD. I4I 

knowable in the revelations which He has made of Him- 
self, in nature, in man, in Christ Jesus. The word at- 
tribute, when applied to God, means what would the 
word quality when applied to man ; to material things. 
Philosophers will tell you that the infinite is not know- 
able by the finite. In the sense of absolute and exhaust- 
ive knowledge, this is true. And when Jesus says, " No 
man knoweth the Father but the Son," it is one meaning 
of the passage. Here the Infinite knows the Infinite. 
You might as well try to decant the ocean into a pint 
cup, as to extend the compass of the finite, so that its 
extremities shall embrace the infinite. But for all that 
the finite is the unit of the infinite. It is just as true, 
that often the finite is unknowable to the finite. As be- 
tween man and man, knowledge is relative. The child 
can not know its father as a man can know him. But 
the child can know what is knowable of a father to a 
child ; can know it as well as a man, and perhaps even 
better. 

Herbert Spencer thus sums up the results of his " Syn- 
thetic Philosophy ": "It has been shown by analysis of 
both our religions and our scientific ideas, that while 
knowledge of the cause which produces effect on our con- 
sciousness is impossible, the existence of a cause for these 
effects is a dictum of consciousness. [That is, God has 
made us so, that we must believe in Him, whether through 
philosophy we can know Him or not]. We have seen 
that the belief in a Power in which no limit in time and 
space can be conceived, is that fundamental element in 
religion which survives all its changes of form. [This is 
God's cipher which He has written on every soul of man]. 
We have seen that all Philosophies, avowedly or tacitly 



142 THE KNOW ABLE THINGS OF GOD. 

recognize this ultimate truth : that while the Relativist 
rightly repudiates these definite assertions which the Ab- 
solutist makes respecting existence transcending percep- 
tion, he is yet at last compelled to unite with him in 
predicating existence transcending perception. And this 
impregnable consciousness in which Religion and Phil- 
osophy are at one with Common Sense, is that likewise 
on which all exact science is based. We have found that 
subjective science can give no account of those condi- 
tioned modes of being which constitute consciousness 
without postulating unconditioned being. [Here is where 
the Spirit of God casts His shadow on the spirit of man]. 
And we have found that objective Science can give no 
account of the world which we know as external without 
regarding its changes of form, as manifestations of some- 
thing that continues constant under all forms. This is 
also the implication to which we are now led back by 
our completed synthesis. The recognition of a persistent 
Force, ever changing its manifestations, but unchanged 
in quantity, throughout all past and all future time, is 
that which we find alone makes possible each concrete 
interpretation ; and at last unifies all concrete interpre- 
tations. Not, indeed, that this coincidence adds to the 
strength of the logical argument as a logical structure. 
Our synthesis has proceeded by taking for granted 
at every step this ultimate truth ; and the ultimate 
truth cannot, therefore, be regarded as in any sense 
an outcome of the synthesis. Nevertheless, the coinci- 
dence yields a verification. For, when treating the data 
of Philosophy it was pointed out that we cannot take 
even the first step without making assumptions ; and that 
the only course is to proceed with them as provisional, 



THE KNOWABLE THINGS OF GOD. 



143 



until they are proved true by the congruity of all the re- 
sults reached. This congruity we here see to be perfect 
and all-embracing ; holding throughout that entire struc- 
ture of definite consciousness of relations which we call 
knowledge, and harmonizing with it that indefinite con- 
sciousness of existence transcending relations which 
forms the essence of Religion." 

It seems, then, that in philosophy both the Relativist 
and the Absolutist are compelled to erect an altar in- 
scribed as that in Athens: "To the Unknown God!" 
Subjective science postulates unconditioned being as back 
of human consciousness. Objective science can give no 
account of the outer world without the same postulate as 
back of that world. And Religion may say to them both 
in the language of the Apostle : " Whom, therefore, ye 
ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you ; " whom ye 
postulate I reveal. There is a sense in which everything 
absolute is unknowable ; everything unconditioned is 
unknowable. There is not an attribute of God, as man 
conceives of Him, of which man or angel can say of it, 
I know it ! Naturally speaking, it is an uncommuni- 
cable mystery. The necessity of His being ; His infinite 
knowledge ; his presence everywhere ; His creative 
power ; all these things, though philosophy may confess 
her need of them, and belief in them, man cannot abso- 
lutely know them ; that is, take in their dimensions. But 
no more can he take in the dimensions of what we call 
infinite space, so thickly peopled with worlds ; of the 
greater worlds of water in which the great continents are 
embosomed, lulled and soothed by their eternal mono- 
tone ; no more can he take in the fact of hia-own exis- 
tence : an island of finite being between the seas of two 



144 



THE KNOWABLE THINGS OF GOD. 



eternities ; of his own eternal future. " To-day I am ; 
yesterday I was not; to-morrow whither am I to go?" 
Is this thing knowable ? 

" This green, flowery, rock-built earth," says Carlyle, 
" the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas ; 
that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead ; • the 
winds sweeping through it ; the black cloud fashioning 
itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain ; 
what is it ? Ay, what ? At bottom we do not know ; 
we can never know at all. It is not by our superior in- 
sight we escape the difficulty ; it is by our superior levity, 
our inattention, our want of insight. It is not by think- 
ing that we cease to wonder at it. This Universe, ah ! 
me, what is it? 'God's creation!' the religious people 
answer. 'Almighty God's!' Atheistic science babbles 
poorly of it with scientific nomenclatures, experiments 
and what not, as if it were a poor dead thing, to be bot- 
tled up in Leyden jars and sold over counters ; but the 
natural sense of man, in all times, if he will honestly ap- 
ply his sense, proclaims it to be a living thing ; ah ! an 
unspeakable, godlike thing ; towards which the best atti- 
tude for us, after never so much science, is awe, devout 
prostration and humility of soul ; worship, if not in 
words, then in silence." 

Spencer admits that science is compelled to postulate 
unconditioned being, in order to account for conditioned 
being. Why is this ? Simply because conditioned be- 
ing is the result of conditioning unconditioned being. 
The thing formed suggests the former. But to condition 
unconditioned being is impossible says Science. Ter- 
tullian said of the incarnation : " certum quia impossible 
est," " it is certain, because it is impossible." Philoso- 



THE KNOWABLE THINGS OF GOD. 1 45 

phy says, " It is a contradiction in terms to say the abso- 
lute can be conditioned." It is a contradiction in terms 
to say the God-Man. Here is the unconditioned con- 
ditioned. Contradiction or not, the absolute has been , 
conditioned, and Philosophy thus admits it : " The re- 
cognition of a persistent Force, ever changing its mani- 
festations, but unchanged in quantity, throughout all past 
and future time, is that which we find alone makes pos- 
sible each concrete interpretation, and at last unifies all 
concrete interpretations." How can there be force with- 
out some Power to exert it ? Life pulsates in Nature's 
heart as in man's. This force is the Godhead conditioned. 
Put that into the language of the Bible and how will it 
read? "For by Him were all things created that are in 
heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether 
they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or pow- 
ers ; all things were created by Him and for Him. And 
He is before all things, and by Him all things consist." 
This makes possible each concrete interpretation, and at 
last unifies all concrete interpretations. 

The universe itself is God's epistle, written with His 
finger on the blue tablets above ; an epistle known and 
read of all men. The earth, with her day and night, 
with her yearly drama in four acts : Spring, Summer, 
Autumn, Winter ; wheels through space, making music 
amid the spheres. Man, a microcosm; the world in 
miniature ; man as God made him in Adam, and as in 
Christ Jesus God would have him, since he bears God's 
image ; man, God in miniature ; all these are concrete 
interpretations of a persistent Force, ever changing its 
manifestations, but unchanged in quantity ; interpreta- 
tions to be unified and harmonized, when in the fullness 



146 



THE KNOWABLE THINGS OF GOD. 



of time the Father shall gather together in one all things 
in Christ : both which are in Heaven and which are on 
earth, even in Him ! 

I do not care that Philosophy tells me that this thing 
cannot be done, on any basis which she can explain ; I 
do not care though Philosophy should say, that tried by 
her test, matter is Eternal ; cannot be created ; must al- 
ways have been matter ; Philosophy that can evolve what- 
ever she may choose to make, out of star-dust and prim- 
ordial germs ! I do not want a religion which Philoso- 
phy can explain. I want a religion whose very presence 
among men cannot be explained, except upon a super- 
natural basis ; except upon the theory that the Uncon- 
ditioned has burst through the barriers by which, accord- 
ing to Philosophy, it is surrounded ; a religion which has 
done what human Philosophy pronounces impossible on 
any natural basis. All these efforts to bring the super- 
natural down to the level of the natural ; to give to in- 
spiration only the authority accorded to it by human 
reason ; to explain miracles according to the operation of 
unknown natural laws ; are efforts to strip Religion of its 
God -given seal, namely : the supernatural ; the unex- 
plainable, the incomprehensible, the impossible, upon any 
natural, finite principles of Philosophy. I am glad that 
man's Philosophy tells me that much as God's existence 
must be assumed to explain anything, she can not reveal 
Him. He is to her not knowable. It is exactly what 
the Bible teaches. 

A revealed religion is something on a higher sphere 
than man's Philosophy has ever reached ; can ever reach. 
President Seeley says of Miracles : "A miracle is a sensi- 
ble event wrought by God in attestation of the truth. It 



THE KNOWABLE THINGS OF GOD. 1 47 

therefore must occur in nature, else it would not be ap- 
prehensible to our senses ; and it must at the same time 
be beyond the power of nature to produce, else it would 
not disclose an agency which belongs to the Author of 
nature alone. A miracle is not simply an extraordinary 
event which, however unfrequent, occurs through the 
regular action of the same forces that produce the ordi- 
nary events in nature, and which might be foreknown by 
one acquainted with its cause ; but it is an event which 
nature by its own action never would have brought forth, 
and for vvhich the power of God alone is adequate. It 
is not a new birth from nature's teeming womb ; but a 
new beginning which rises at once from an Almighty fiat. 
It is not a development, but a creation. It shows a new 
force introduced into nature, by which nature is checked 
and changed. A miracle may be defined, therefore, as a 
counteraction of nature by the Author of nature." The 
engineer who makes the train's movement applies the 
power that brings the train to a standstill. 

In this sense, human philosophy, which deals only with 
the natural and not at all with the supernatural, says that 
a miracle is impossible. I say, because it is impossible on 
natural grounds ; because it cannot be proved on such 
grounds, and is here, it indicates the presence and power 
of some One, who is in nature, and above nature, and 
over nature, and to whom nature is obedient ; by whom 
all things consist. If in miracles God entered the por- 
tal which is open to nature, rather than the portal which 
He openeth and no man shutteth, how could we know 
that it is He ? I am very much interested in such dis- 
cussions of the question of Miracles, as Charles Kingsley 
gives us in his Alton Locke. But, after all, they are a 



I48 THE KNOWABLE THINGS OF GOD. 

possible philosophy of what God has purposely left with- 
out explanation ; and the very fact that they are not ex- 
plained gives them their power as proofs of the presence 
of One, whose presence needed to be proved less than 
explained. You may tell me that miracles are only a 
new custom of nature, with which I am not familiar. I 
tell you that if they proceed from nature, they do not 
answer the demands of the case. A comet may appear 
to be a miracle. But when I learn that its orbit is just as 
really fixed as that of the sun, I no longer regard it as 
such. You say, that comet attests your divine mission 
I say that comet was coming, any way. You may tell me 
that when Jesus turned the water into wine at Cana of 
Galilee, he only expedited the process which goes on in 
the grape-vine every season. Nature, too, converts water, 
moisture, sap, into wine. I acknowledge the truth and 
beauty of the analogy ; I accept the same Being as the 
author of each process ; but how is it easier for me to be- 
lieve that Jesus makes wine at Cana on the instant, when 
I know that He makes it in all earth's vineyards by due 
process of nature ? Instead of bringing nature up, you 
have brought the miracle down. I do not want to see 
that His miracle is no miracle at all ; is only a hidden 
law of nature which nature does not ordinarily reveal ; 
is wonderful only because of one's ignorance. And when 
Jesus stands before the tomb of Lazarus I do not want it 
suggested that just as there is a law in nature, that after 
winter shall come the new life of grasses and trees in the 
spring, so there is a law that after death shall come a new 
life to the body of man, and that Christ only anticipates 
in the case of Lazarus, what it is in nature to do for all 
mankind if we only wait till she is ready. You still keep 



THE KNOWABLE THINGS OF GOD. 1 49 

me in the realm of the natural. I acknowledge the truth 
and beauty of these analogies ; but what you make level 
to my reason through philosophy, you take away from 
my faith. People do not believe in the supernatural 
birth of Christ, because it is contrary to nature. They 
do not believe in the inspiration of the Bible, because it 
is contrary to nature. They do not believe in the re- 
generation of man, because it is contrary to nature. They 
do not believe in anything which they cannot account 
for according to the laws of nature. Says Herbert Spen- 
cer : " If religion and Science are to be reconciled, the 
basis of reconciliation must be this deepest, widest, and 
most certain of all facts : that the Power which the Uni- 
verse manifests to us is utterly inscrutable." This is to 
give up the whole question in dispute ; to destroy the 
very meaning of the word Revelation ; the very office of 
the incarnation, as explained by Him who became incar- 
nate. " I came forth from the Father, and am come into 
the world ; again, I leave the world and go to the Father." 
God claims that He has reconciled Science and Religion, 
not by remaining inscrutable, but by becoming con- 
ditioned in Christ Jesus. 

II. God is knowable in His relations. In justifying 
his right and obligation to speak the truth which he has 
thought, Herbert Spencer says : " Whoever hesitates to 
utter what he thinks the highest truth, lest it should be 
too much in advance of his time, may reassure himself 
by looking at his acts from an impersonal point of view. 
Let him duly realize the fact that opinion is the agency 
through which character adapts external arrangements to 
itself; that his opinion rightly forms part of this agency ; 
is a unit of force, constituting with other such units the 



I50 THE KNOW ABLE THINGS OF GOD. 

general power which works out social changes ; and he 
will perceive that he may properly give full utterance to 
his inmost conviction ; leaving it to produce what effect 
it may. It is not for nothing that he has in him these 
sympathies with some principles and repugnance to 
others. He, with all his capacities and aspirations and 
beliefs, is not an accident, but a product of the time. He 
must remember that while he is a descendant of the past 
he is a parent of the future ; and that his thoughts are 
as children to him, which he may not carelessly let die. 
He, like every other man, may properly consider himself 
as one of the myriad agencies through whom works the 
Unknown Cause ; and when the Unknown Cause pro- 
duces in him a certain belief, he is thereby authorized to 
profess and act out that belief. For, to render in their 
highest sense the words of the poet : 

" Nature is made better by no mean, 
But nature makes that mean ; over that art 
Which you may say adds to nature, is an art 
That nature makes." 

Not as adventitious, therefore, will the wise man regard 
the faith which is in him. The highest truth he sees he 
will fearlessly utter ; knowing that let come what will of 
it, he is thus playing his part in the world ; knowing that 
if he can effect the change he aims at, well ; if not, well, 
also, though not so well." 

This is very remarkable language for one who teaches 
that the Unknown Cause has no power to condition him- 
self : " When the Unknown Cause produces in him a 
certain belief he is thereby authorized to profess and act 
out that belief." How different is this from the language 
which Jehovah used to Moses in answer to the question : 



THE KNOWABLE THINGS OF GOD. 151 

" Behold, when I come un o the children of Israel, and 
they ask me, 1 Who is He that hath sent me ?' what shall 
I say unto them?" And God said unto Moses: "Thus 
shalt thou say unto the children of Israel : "I Am hath 
sent me unto thee." If the great Unknown Cause pro- 
duces in the philosopher, Herbert Spencer, a belief which 
gives him authority to utter it, how is that different, as to 
the matter of conditioning Himself, from speaking 
through Moses and all the prophets ? 

Here is this phenomenon of Moses, the great Hebrew 
Lawgiver ; the great Hebrew Leader and Prophet ; for 
all the Mosaic system prophesied of Him who was to 
come ; how are we to account for him ? We say with 
the Bible, with the Lord Jesus Himself, that in this 
Moses, as God's servant and revelation, God is knowable. 
God raised him up. God spake through him. God ap- 
proved him and reproved him, and finally closed his 
career prematurely because of his sin. In His relations 
to this Moses and to the remarkable people whom he 
moulded to his will and to the will of God, God con- 
ditioned Himself; God is revealed. Herbert Spencer 
says, " that what we call truth, guiding us to a successful 
action and the consequent maintenance of life, is simply 
the accurate correspondence of subjective to objective re- 
lations." The truth, then, according to Herbert Spencer, 
which guided Moses, he found suggested by his outward 
circumstances ; and in these outward circumstances was 
the will of the Being whom this philosopher calls the 
great Unknown Cause. Was not this will of the Un- 
known Cause conditioned, then, in the life of Moses? 
The phenomenon of Herbert Spencer, according to his 
own interpretation of it, as given in his own language, is 



152 THE KNOWABLE THINGS OF GOD. 

explicable in precisely the same manner. If the great 
Unknown Cause works in Herbert Spencer as one of His 
myriad agencies to produce a certain belief, and if this 
working in him authorizes him to profess and act out that 
belief, the Unknown Cause so far conditions Himself as 
to have some personality properly ascribed to Him, be- 
cause of Herbert Spencer. 

The attitude of a majority of the most advanced of 
modern scientists is this : either that there is no God at 
all, or, that though we must in our studies and specula- 
tions postulate such an Existence, He has no way of so 
conditioning Himself; of so revealing Himself to His 
creatures, as a person, that they can know Him. We 
can not account for the material world which He has 
caused without Him ; we cannot account for the first 
principles of our own mental condition without Him ; 
but, in making the worlds, and in making man He has 
unfortunately lost the cipher by which he may communi- 
cate with His intelligent creatures ; so that the orb of 
His being wheels aloft, coldly isolated in the infinity of 
of His nature ; so that humanity is still groping in the 
darkness and woe of those who are without hope and 
without God in the world. There is a great difference, 
to be sure, between denying that there is a God, and de- 
nying that though there must be a great Cause of all 
things, He is unknown to man ; he is unknowable by 
man. And when the late Professor William H. Clifford, 
of London, says, as the last word which the evolutionist 
has to utter as to the being and agency of one Eternal 
Mind : "On the whole, therefore, we seem entitled to 
conclude that during such time as we have evidence of, 
no intelligence or volition has been concerned in events 



THE KNOWABLE THINGS OF GOD. 



153 



happening within the range of the solar system, except 
that of animals living on the planets. The weight of 
such probabilities is, of course, estimated differently by 
different people, and the questions are only beginning to 
receive the right sort of attention. But it does seem to 
me that we may expect in time to have negative evidence 
on this point of the same kind and of the same cogency 
as that which forbids us to assume the existence between 
the Earth and Venus, of a planet as large as either of 
them." I say when Professor Clifford says this, it seems 
very different from the mere reverent utterance of Her- 
bert Spencer : " The consciousness of an Inscrutable 
Power manifested to us through all phenomena, has been 
growing ever clearer, and must eventually be freed from 
its imperfections. The certainty that on the one hand, 
such a Power exists, while on the other, its nature trans- 
cends intuition, and is beyond imagination, is the cer- 
tainty towards which intelligence has been from the first 
progressing. To this conclusion science inevitably ar- 
rives as it reaches its confines ; while to this conclusion 
Religion is irresistibly driven by criticism. And, satisfy- 
ing as it does, the demands of a most rigorous logic, at 
the same time that it gives the religious sentiment the 
widest sphere of action, it is the conclusion we are bound 
to accept without reserve or qualification I say the first 
utterance is very different from the last ; but we may well 
ask if they are not pathways to the same inn of Atheism, 
where many modern scientists have already put up. One 
is a gnostic atheist, and the other is an agnostic atheist. 
And the agnostic atheist — that is, the man who knows not 
whether there be any God, and whether if there be, He 
can communicate with his creatures, nay, denies that He 



154 THE KNOW ABLE THINGS OF GOD. 



can do this, the agnostic atheist may well pause and con- 
sider whether rigid logic will not land him eventually 
with the gnostic atheist. It is yery innocent, apparently, 
to tamper with a conjecture ; and to revolutionize our re- 
ligious principles, under the sway of an hypothesis ; but, it 
may be well to ask in the name of science, as well as reli- 
gion, whither the logic which we tentatively adopt is likely 
to lead us ; and whether it may not be into that bog of 
infidelity where a soul sinks and bemires itself forever. 

There are, doubtless, some scientists of the modern 
school, who are theists. "They are evolutionists; but 
they are neither materialistic nor atheistic evolutionists. 
They believe in the soul, and the conscience, and the 
future life, in a personal God, and many of them in a 
supernatural revelation. They find nothing in the teach- 
ings of science or the doctrine of evolution as they hold 
it, which is inconsistent with their Christian faith or their 
theistic philosophy." But, have they ever looked their 
theory through to its most rigid and logical conclusion ? 
Their theism is likely the result of Christian experience. 
They have found God conditioning Himself in Christ 
Jesus, walking among men ; dwelling by His Spirit in 
their own souls ; personal in the power of Christianity. 
Their theism is therefore secure. But do they ever con- 
sider the peril to the religious nature of a young student 
from taking as an hypothesis, even " a working hypothesis," 
this theory, which to so many minds, either excludes God 
from material things, or makes it impossible for Him to 
reveal Himself there? 

This is not a question of the antagonism of Religion 
and Science. Science confesses that she has never found 
a single fact to prove that this hypothesis is correct ; and 



i 

THE KNOWABLE THINGS OF GOD. 155 

yet science is nothing, unless she have facts behind her. 
She confesses that of the thirty -thousand well-defined and 
thoroughly accredited species found imbedded in the rocks 
not one is in the hypothetical transition -state, which Dar- 
winism requires. May not religion well ask, if this hy- 
pothesis does not belong to the category, not of true 
science, which knows nothing but what facts declare, but 
of science falsely so called ? And may she not ask her 
own gifted sons, before they commit themselves to it, as 
"a working hypothesis," to consider just where its relent- 
less logic is likely to land, not themselves, perhaps, but 
younger minds, not well-grounded in their religious faith ? 

" Because that which may be known of God is manifest 
unto them ; for God hath showed it unto them." The 
Bible assumes that the knowable things of God, his eternal 
power and Godhead, are testified even to the heathen. Is 
it not a striking illustration of the atheism of our nature, 
that the best thought of the scientists of modern times 
addresses itself to the effort of either proving that there 
is no God, or that He is inexorably shut out from the 
realm of material things, which even the best materialis- 
tic philosophy cannot explain without Him ? " For after 
that in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew 
not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching 
to save them that believe." 

" And what is he ? The ripe grain nods 

The sweet dews fall, the sweet flow'rs blow ; 
But darker signs His presence show : 

The earthquake and the storm are God's, 
And good and evil interflow. 

O hearts of love ! O souls that turn 
Like sunflowers to the pure and best ! 



THE KNOWABLE THINGS OF GOD. 

To you the truth is manifest : 
For they the mind of Christ discern, 
Who lean like John upon His breast. 

In Him of whom the sybil told, 

For whom the prophet's heart was toned ; 

Whose need, the sage and magian owned ; 
The loving heart of God, behold : 

The hope for which the ages groaned ! 

The world sits at the feet of Christ, 
Unknowing, blind and unconsoled : 
It yet shall touch His garment's fold, 

And feel the Heavenly Alchemist 
Transform its very dust to gold. 

The theme befitting angel tongues, 
Beyond a mortal's scope has grown : 
O heart of mine, with rever'nce own 

The fullness, which to it belongs, 

And trust the unknown for the known." 



IX. 



THE LAW OF ADAPTATION IN SPIRITUAL 
THINGS. 

Matt. XXV, 26 and 27.—" Thou knowest that I reaped 
where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strowed. 
Thou oughtest, therefore, to have put my money to the ex- 
changers, and then, at my coming, I should have received 
mine own, with usury." 

The Saviour does not imply, in this parable, that there 
is any injustice in the government of God. He never 
sets Himself up as a critic of God^s economy. He is sat- 
isfied with it ; the love of it ; the law of it. He urges 
that the best solution of what seems to some minds to be 
unjust, of what is mysterious to them, is to try and make 
the best of it ; to try and fit in to it, and bring a blessing 
out of it, as we surely can. 

There is nothing more rigid than what we call a' law 
of nature. It has no margin for play. The fish- 
erman, for example, studies the winds and tides, and 
adapts himself to them ; he does not undertake to 
regulate them, but he uses them, as his appliances, 
to get out on the fishing ground, and to get back 
to his little home. If the tide sets out at midnight, he 
is up and sets out with it. That is the tide which, taken 
at its flood, leads him to fortune ; and, when it sets back 



158 THE LAW OF ADAPTATION 

again, he goes back upon it with his fortune. Indeed his life; 
the art and skill of it, I mean ; his life is largely an ad- 
aptation of himself to the laws of God in the ocean and the 
air. If wind and tide wait for no man, he does not ask them 
to wait for him. He takes them and makes the most of 
them. The moment he sets himself against these laws ; 
the moment he is careless of them, his boat is swamped 
and he is their victim. Seaside disasters come from ig- 
norance of things familiar to seafaring men. or careless- 
ness respecting them. Little lads, who are brought up at 
the seaside, are so familiar with these laws, and learn so 
early to adapt themselves to them, that to manage a boat 
becomes almost second nature, and they can no more be 
drowned than a fish. Water is their element, no less 
than the land. All that uncertainty, that impotence, 
which the landsman feels, they never experience. Nay 
more, there is a kind of exhilaration in their mastery of 
these mighty forces of Nature, which gives fascination to 
the seaman's life ; and yet it is mastery only by adapta- 
tion. 

The same is more or less true in the life of the farmer. 
He has to do with other uniform laws of nature ; for, if 
the sea is God's, and He made it, so, also, His hands 
formed the dry land. After the Deluge, God made a 
covenant with Noah, respecting the Earth's uniformity, to 
this effect : that while the Earth remains, seed time and 
harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and 
day and night shall not cease. The sign of that covenant 
is the bow in the clouds. Just as the tides come and go, so 
come the light and the darkness, the day and the night ; 
the heat of summer, the cold of winter ; the day-time 
and the night-time of the year ; the time to sow and the 



IN SPIRITUAL THINGS. 



159 



time to reap. The sun, moon, and stars are regular in 
their courses ; as though they moved by clock-work. And 
all his life long, the farmer studies how to adapt himself to 
these fluctuating, as he calls them, uniform movements, as 
they are; how best to give and take from the laws of God in 
material things. It is his art ; his skill ; his knack. He 
nourishes the soil ; the soil nourishes him. To fit in to 
what God has done and is doing in the land, which he 
dresses, and in the stock, which he raises, makes him the 
good farmer. 

This is man's relation to God's material economy ; a 
relation of adaptation, and of mastery through adapta- 
tion. He studies into it, and accommodates himself to 
it, and thus is master of the situation. If God has stored 
the coal in the bowels of the earth, he seeks it there ; he 
does not complain because it has not been deposited at his 
doorway. He digs it out and conveys it to his doorway. 
If God has stored the timber in the trackless forest, there 
he sends the lumberman to fell it, and to drive it along 
the dashing river thoroughfares to the centers of civili- 
zation and trade, and to transport it to the great markets. 
Is it strange that God insists upon the same law of adap- 
tation in spiritual things ? Is it strange that God should 
have, in the same manner, surrounded man with spiritual 
forces, and commanded him to make the most of them 
for himself, for his fellowman, and for his Creator ? This 
is only according to the analogy suggested by his relation 
to material things. 

THE LAW OF ADAPTATION IN SPIRITUAL THINGS, OR WISE 
SPIRITUAL STEWARDSHIP. 

Let this be the subject of study this morning. 



i6o 



THE LAW OF ADAPTATION 



I. The wise spiritual steward accepts the facts of the 
case. We may always be sure that fact is a reality a 
theory may be a phantom. 

There are some men who are always asking why God 
did not constitute things differently. As in the kingdom 
of nature, so in the kingdom of grace. They speak of God 
as a hard man. They complain, because of their own 
tendency to evil ; because this tendency is transmitted 
by heredity ; because their our circumstances are so un- 
favorable ; because other men have a better chance than 
they have ; because God's law is too exacting ; because 
the penalty of sin is too excessive ; because the method 
of salvation is offensive to their taste ; is unreasonable 
and hard to comply with ; in a word, that God is a hard 
man, and their case a hard case. They are the great ob- 
jectors to God's moral government ; always rising to a 
point of order. 

A man finds himself on a rocky New England farm. 
He objects. He rises to a point of order. He would 
rather hunt or fish than work. He dreads the task of 
blasting rock, of rooting out stumps, of breaking up vir- 
gin soil. He sees that some of his neighbors have farms 
on the beautiful intervals ; that the struggle for a living by 
farming must be a hard one for him ; and so he makes up 
his mind to spend his time in finding fault, and in won- 
dering why his lot is so much harder than that of other 
men. This was the spirit of the unprofitable steward in 
the text. Thus he complained. He had but a single 
talent, while some of his fellow-stewards had five ; his 
master had been more generous to the other stewards ; 
he required more usury of his stewards than they could 
possibly secure. So he wraps his talent in a napkin, and 



IN SPIRITUAL THINGS. 



161 



hides it in the earth. If his master wanted it, he would 
find it there. 

There is no wisdom in blinking facts. A man cannot 
understand his environment without admitting the facts, 
out of which he originates, of which he is part, and to 
which he tends. Evangelical religion is the only candid 
one ; the only one that takes the facts as they are. It is 
a serious thing to belong to the human race. It is a serious 
thing to be a descendant of the First Adam. It is a serious 
thing to be responsible to God for the use we make of 
our knowledge of the Second Adam. Between these two 
facts, the advocates of evangelical religion take their 
stand ; not as philosophers, but to act upon them, and 
thus work out their proper solution. The advocate of 
what is self-styled a more liberal school of thought, comes 
along and says, " This account of the origin of the hu- 
man family is fabulous. Teach it to children, but not to 
grown men. God never so constituted the race as Saint 
Paul describes. Heredity of evil is a thing ridiculous." 
But you say in reply, " I find a law in numbers, that when I 
would do good, evil is present with me." I find something 
there which works just as the tide does ; which comes in 
in its might, and weeps away all my tender sentiments 
and mighty resolutions. Who shall deliver me from the 
body of this death ? 

The believer in Evangelical religion does just as the 
seaman does ; just as the farmer does ; he accepts the facts 
of his environment, and acts upon them ; they are the 
data of his problem of life. He is a man of unclean lips, 
and he belongs to a people of unclean lips. 

It is a notable thing that the laws of mankind are 
framed to fit a race, just as Evangelical, and not Liberal, 



l62 



THE LAW OF ADAPTATION 



Religion describes them : a fallen race ; a race with de- 
cided tendencies to evil ; a race that never realizes its 
highest possibilities ; needing the threat of penalties, as 
well as the promise of rewards. Human laws are practi- 
cal things. They are leveled at realities at flesh and 
blood, as it is. They have to take humanity as they find 
it. Those who make these laws say : " When man gives 
way to his passions he is liable to steal, to kill, to commit 
adultery. We must make our laws to fit the facts of 
the case." There is no opportunity for the play 
of sentiment in law-making. It is true that the thief has a 
father and a mother, a wife, and children, and that they are 
all involved in the consequences of his crime. But the law 
considers only that he is a thief ; the jury and the judge 
consider only that he is a thief ; and as such, despite all 
sentiment, he must be taken from parents, from wife, from 
children, and given the fate of a thief, and the punish- 
ment of a thief. The law holds itself to the facts of the 
case. 

Take this one fact, that your moral tendency is sinful ; 
that. you have appetites and forces within you, which, if 
unrestrained, which, if misdirected, may lead you to 
crime against man and sin against God. There is a man 
in New Hampshire, nearly 97 years of age, who is sus- 
pected of the brutal assassination of one of his neighbors. 
It took nearly a century for this man to come to maturity 
of wickedness. The fact of this potentiality toward evil 
is a great deal more important than the philosophy. It 
may be true that your strongest tendencies to evil, you 
have received as an heirloom from your immediate ances- 
tors. It may be that your weakness characterized an 
ancestor hundreds of years ago. Race-peculiarities lie 



IN SPIRITUAL THINGS. 



163 



dormant for hundreds of years, and then appear again. 
Physical defects and deformities follow that law; why 
should not moral and spiritual ones? But, whether you 
got your tendencies to evil from your father, who begat 
a son in his own likeness, or from your grandfather, who 
begat a son in his, or from Adam, who begat a son in his, 
the fact remains the same. The tendencies are the same. 
They are just as dangerous ; just as certain, if uncon- 
trolled, to bring you to dishonor, and to punishment. 

Every sinful act, unless turned from by repentance, has 
in itself the germ of a new sinful act. The tendency to 
sin is in sin's nature. There used to be a familiar 
couplet : 

" Lo, what a tangled web we weave 
When first we practice to deceive," 

I do not know as deception has any more sinful germs, 
results in any more of a tangle, than any other sin. 
Every sin is alive with the germs of new sins. A single 
kernel of wheat may have in it a whole harvest, give it 
seasons enough. And sin has as many seasons as it has 
acts. The young lad, who to-day breaks the Sabbath, 
does not know what other violations of God's law will 
spring from this violation ; lie enfolded within it. The 
difference between being in the Sabbath School, or in the 
House of God, and being on a Sunday excursion down 
the river, or being out boating up the river, may seem 
very slight ; but it may prove a divergence from well-do- 
ing, the consequences of which will be eternal. From 
the same summit waters seek the Atlantic and the Pacific. 

Perhaps on this very Sabbath God had a message for 
him, which he would have heard. Perhaps on this very 



164 THE LAW OF ADAPTATION 

Sabbath the Tempter was ready to set a snare for his feet 
out of which he never will be delivered. The young man 
may say, " Well, I will go this once, and that shall be the 
end of it." He cannot say what will be the end of it. 
The end of it is not yet. For one act of sin is the* be- 
ginning of another act of sin. He does not come back 
from that day of unhallowed recreation the same young 
man he was. He has broken his former relations with 
the people of God ; the Bible ; the sanctuary ; perhaps 
with God himself. He has entered into new relations to 
other people, and other influences. Sin is a thing that 
cannot be trifled with. We can never say of it, " Only 
this once." The Bible says, " Fools make a mock at sin." 
•'And sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." 
That which bringeth forth death is not a thing which can 
be safely mocked at, or trifled with. Think of trifling 
with the tides of the great ocean ; with the winds of the 
heavens. 

Over against this fact of sin, God has set another fact : 
salvation from sin by the Atonement ! There is a way of 
getting away from God. Human nature has tried it ; is 
trying it still. The tendencies to evil in your nature and 
in my nature are just as much facts as the ebb and flow 
of the tides are facts. The tide of evil breaks, with its 
great monotone of woe, upon the shores of time, from the 
days of Adam until now. What is said in the Bible, with 
regard to the sin of mankind, what you have observed 
in yourself and in other men, you may depend upon, 
just as you may depend upon what your eyes see at the 
seashore ; as to the coming in and going out of the great 
waters. God has said there : " Thus far, and no farther ; 
and here shall thy proud waves be stayed." But, within 



IN SPIRITUAL THINGS. 



165 



God's limits, man can safely have to do with them, only 
as he studies them and takes advantage of their laws. 
They are the ultimate facts with which he has to do, but 
which he cannot change. 

Over against the fact of rocks that are hid beneath the 
surface of the water, of places that are dangerous at low 
tide, Government has placed the fact of lighthouses, 
whose flame burns all through the hours of darkness, and 
bells, that restlessly toll day and night, to warn the sea- 
man of danger ; Government has placed the fact of the 
life-saving service. If you should see such a majestic 
structure of massive masonry as Minot's Ledge Light, 
bound to the solid rock beneath the waves with bands of 
iron, erected at a point where there is no danger, you 
might well ask of the Government, " Wherefore this 
waste? Why was not some of this expense laid out on points 
where the approach to the coast is dangerous ; where sea- 
men are every year caught in the hungry waves?" The 
fact of the Atonement is like the fact of such an expens- 
ive structure. There stands the Cross. It is to be taken 
as a fact. Against the tendencies to evil in man's nature ; 
against the endless ruin which, when they are finished, 
awaits upon them ; God has set up in this lost world the 
Cross of His Son. Like the inscription on Eddystone 
Lighthouse, this Cross might be inscribed, " I give light, 
and I save life." Sin is in this world as a fact. How- 
ever it came here, whatever its consequences ; read sacred 
history ; read profane history ; read your own hearts ; 
read the hearts of other men ; you find it to be a fact. 
Over against it God has set another fact. Whatever the 
manner in which it does it ; whether by legal satisfaction 
to God ; whether by moral suasion of man ; whether by 



i66 



THE LAW OF ADAPTATION 



introducing a new law of self-sacrifice and obedience ; 
whether by awakening a sense of personal gratitude ; 
whether in all these ways ; whatever the hiding of its 
power, and God does not explain it, He reveals it, it is 
just as much a fact as sin is. If sinfulness takes you one 
way, the Atonement takes you another way. If the tide, 
which goes out in its ebbing, takes you away from the 
joys and the blessings of your fireside, the returning tide 
takes you back to safety and to peace. 

IT. The wise spiritual steward not only accepts the 
facts of the case, but adapts himself and his life to them. 
" He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, 
he it is that loveth me." 

It is a proof of God's goodness, and also of the wisdom 
of His economy, that the moment a man seeks to come 
into harmony with this economy, he not only has in- 
ward peace, but also his outward relations no longer cre- 
ate friction. Furl a vessel's sails, and cast over her 
anchor, and how soon she sits the waters at rest. Lift her 
anchor, unfurl her sail, bring her round to the wind, and 
how quick she speeds away, like a thing of life. The 
Psalmist says, " Great peace have the} that love thy law. 
Nothing shall offend them." Law and peace ! They 
always walk together. One of the reasons given by those, 
who think there should be a new statement in theology, 
is the fact, that men of genius, such as Emerson and 
Carlye and Burns, have not been willing to accept the 
old. But, David did ; Daniel did ; John did, and Paul did. 
These were men of genius, too. These things have been hid 
from the wise and prudent, and have been revealed unto 
babes. There are many things to be said about the rela- 
tion of such men to Christianity. Whether they accept 



IN SPIRITUAL THINGS. 



I6 7 



it, or not, they always speak of it, admiringly. It is the 
ideal thing which has come into human history. So much 
is wrung from them,willing or unwilling. Of Carlyle it may 
be said, that he believed in the religion of his mother for 
her, and that she was his ideal of a Christian woman ; that 
when he and Jane Welsh, his wife, began housekeeping, 
they began with having family prayers ; and that when his 
father died, he wrote home to the brother in charge, urging 
that he take his father's place as priest of the house- 
hold ; that the sacrificial flame of worship might not die 
out. What Burns actually thought of Christianity, may 
be gathered from his " Cotter's Saturday Night ;" and not 
from the sharp and satirical things he wrote, when quar- 
reling with the inconsistences and absurdities of some of 
his contemporaries, who had brought him to book for his 
immoralities. 

There are those, who are Christian philosophers, and no 
more. They accept the facts of the situation. They 
philosophize about them, as though they were not involved 
in them. They are like the men, who, shut up in their 
safe and cosy chambers, study the currents of the ocean 
rom observation made by others, and not with reference 
to using them, in traversing the great deep. There is 
nothing wrong in the practice of Christian philosophy. 
It is right to study into the deep things of God. But 
there is the sphere of philosophy, and the sphere of life ; 
and the wisest man is always the practical philosopher ; 
the man who acts upon admitted facts; whatever his 
philosophy. One of the peculiarities of the Ocean, are 
its mysterious currents : the Gulf Stream, for example. 
Where does it originate ? What controls its direction and 
temperature and force ? Here is an Oceanic river, mightier 



i68 



THE LAW OF ADAPTATION 



than the Mississippi or the Amazon, whose movement is 
just as independent of its surroundings as though it flowed 
on the land ; banked in by piles of earth. Here is the 
current which brought to Christopher Columbus his first 
actual tidings of the New World ; which once carried 
the bodies of two men of an unknown race on the West- 
ern Continent to the Portuguese Islands off the Western 
shores of Africa, and which deposits upon the coasts of 
Iceland and Norway the trees and fruits of the torrid 
zone. A vessel is burned on the Island of Jamaica ; its 
fragments are found on the coast of Scotland. They float 
on this Ocean River. The practical seaman, knowing of 
the existence of this current, knowing its rate of movement, 
knowing its direction, uses it as a great fact ; gets his vessel 
into it, if it will help her progress to his place of desti- 
nation ; keeps his vessel out of it, if it will hinder her 
progress. 

Christianity is a great fact in the world's life and move- 
ment : like the Gulf Stream, among the Ocean's currents. 
Starting at Bethlehem and Calvary, nay, from the throne 
of God, it flows around the world. Who that traverses the 
Ocean does not recognize the truth that the Gulf Stream 
exerts a great influence upon the inter-communication of 
the nations; upon international traffic ? You say, you think 
it will be well with you hereafter, however you may carry 
yourself toward the Son of God. I might urge you to re- 
member the exclusivenessof some of the Saviour'sutterances: 
as, for example, " He that is not with me, is against me ; 
and he that honoreth not the Son, honoreth not the 
Father that sent Him as well as some of the other utter- 
ances respecting Him ; " that His name -is the only name 
given under Heaven among men, whereby we must be 



IN SPIRITUAL THINGS. 



169 



saved :" but I prefer, to-day, another method. I only 
urge you to adapt yourself to this great fact : " that Jesus 
Christ came into the world to save sinners." Take it as 
a fact, and come into relations to it. Even if a man 
could traverse the Ocean, independently of its great cur- 
rents, here is the Gulf Stream, into which if he get his 
vessel, he is sure of help ; he is sure of a warmer tempera- 
ture ; he is sure of a certain rate of progress toward his 
destination. On the supposition that out of Christ there 
is possible salvation for sinners, which I think the Bible 
expressly denies, is it not better, is it not wiser, to depend 
upon the method of salvation which has taken so many 
souls safely to Heaven, and which you are liberty to adopt? 
There are moral and spiritual forces which proceed 
from the Bible, and the God of the Bible ; from the 
Gospels, and from Him who is the theme of the Gospels, 
which insure in us transformation of character, such as 
those who would enter Heaven, are taught that they must 
seek. There is a tide setting toward Heaven, on which 
if the voyager get, he will be borne thither, as upon the 
bosom of God's eternal purpose. For this is really what 
the doctrine of election means : God's eternal purpose in 
Christ Jesus to save those that believe. 

There are men who make it their profession to violate 
natural laws. If God made man to walk on his feet, 
they want to walk on their heads. They begin when 
they are boys. If God intended man to keep his footing 
on terra firma, they want to go balancing themselves on 
tight ropes, across cataracts. They go diving down into 
great deeps, plunging headlong through impassable rapids, 
defying any and all the laws which God has enacted for 
man's guidance and safety. There is a wantonness of ex- 



170 



THE LAW OF ADAPTATION 



posure, which characterizes the way in which young 
people conduct themselves in the surf, and on board sail- 
ing vessels, which deserves to be publicly rebuked. Who 
that has ever found himself for the moment, baffled and 
bewildered by counter currents in the ocean ; has seen 
how easy it is for such mighty forces to tire him out, and 
sweep him panting to the beach, or bear him out beyond 
the reach of help, need be reminded of this ? If there 
is something admirable in the manner in which an old 
salt conducts himself with reference to the great forces 
with which he has to do, there is, also, something repre- 
hensible in which people unfamiliar with the perils of the 
water, rush blindly into their abysses. 

I stood, talking the other day, with one of my Bible 
class, at Deer Isle, as with a clam digger, a pronged hoe, 
he was turning out four or five small potatoes from each 
hill, on his little farm by the water side. There has been 
a great drought there. He was a man of few words. He 
said : " Let those talk who could. He could not. But, 
he felt it all the same, in his heart." For thirty-five years 
he had followed the sea ; for eleven years he had been 
upon that farm. Which did he like the best ? Why, there 
was more solid satisfaction on the farm. When he raised 
anything, he liked to see it on the table ; and see his 
children eating it. There was less trouble on land than 
on sea. Where did the trouble come from ? From men. 
You could not rely on them. If they got a little advance 
pay, they would leave you at the first port. Did he never 
get out of patience with the wind or the tide for being 
against him, or for setting his vessel on a ledge of rocks ? 
No, that was no use ! That was no use 

There is no use in dashing one's head against God's 



IN SPIRITUAL THINGS. 



I 7 I 



constitution of things. We can use this constitution of 
things for His glory, and for our own good. This is all 
He asks of us. He did not consult us, as to how it was 
wise to constitute material things. And the difference 
between people of different latitudes, in their habits of 
dress, of diet, in everything in which they are unlike ; 
consists largely in their adapting themselves to God's 
constitution of material things around them. The Green - 
lander builds his house of ice ; the Kamskatkan digs a 
hole in the earth for his ; the inhabitant of the temperate 
zones has a structure suited to the climate where he dwells. 
God requires of us just the same adaptation to His moral 
law. Some of us think it would have been better for us ; 
we should stand a better chance if we had the same 
probation Adam had. His nature was not fallen. No. 
But, did this prevent him from sin? You and I have the 
advantage of six thousand years of observation of the 
effect of this tendency to evil which we inherit. It is 
a tide, whose direction and rapidity of movement have 
been recorded in the lives of all those whose biographies 
are given in the Bible. When Americans travel East, 
they often don Oriental costume, because it seems better 
fitted to the exigencies of their situation. But, we need 
no Oriental costume in order to feel that the tendencies 
of such men as sinned in olden time, are just like our 
own. Adam and Eve sinned, just as we sin. David sinned 
as man sins now; so did Absalom. As face answers to face, 
in the water, so the heart of man to man. It is only wenh 
we confront such a statement, as that " Enoch walked 
with God, and was not, because God took him :" 
" Abraham was called the Friend of God :" " Thou shalt 
no longer be called Jacob, but Israel ; because as a 



172 



THE LAW OF ADAPTATION 



prince hast thou power with God, and hast prevailed ;" 
that we are staggered and bewildered. Here is a new 
force; a new tide setting the other way. There is away, 
then, of breaking away from the old law of human 
nature, of trampling it under foot, and of securing estab- 
lishment in a grace that is sufficient for walking with 
God ; of being called the friend of God ; of being 
a prince with God in prayer. It is just as much a 
law, a tendency, a power, if we accept of it, and are 
willing to be controlled by it, as the old la.v and ten- 
dency and power of our nature. Beside that, we know 
that God is in it, and therefore, victory is in it. 

My brother, before you or I settle back and say that 
this moral economy, in which we find ourselves involved, 
is an ungracious and unmerciful one ; is one in which we 
have no fair chance ; is one which discriminates against us; 
let us remember this, that just as real as is our tendency 
to wander away from God, so real and far mightier is that 
power which draws us back to Him. And, that until we 
have yielded to this drawing of God's love, and found 
out what help is in it ; until our souls have seen Jesus 
Christ lifted up, and experienced the truth of His pre- 
diction : " If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me," 
we are in no position to judge of the wisdom and love 
of this economy. 

Think, again, that all that God requires of us in moral 
and spiritual things, is to do just what we here virtually 
do, in ordinary human life : to adapt ourselves to His 
known laws, to learn what He would have us to do, and 
how he would have us do it. For nineteen centuries there 
has been a tide of moral and spiritual influences setting 
toward God and toward Heaven, on which, if man em- 



IN SPIRITUAL THINGS. 



173 



barks, he is sure at last to have that holiness, without 
which no man shall see the Lord. " Thou oughtest, there- 
fore, to put my money to the exchangers, so that at my 
coming I should have received mine own with usury." 
It has been estimated that a drop of water in the Gulf 
Stream would take two years and ten months to return to 
the place of starting ; that a boat, not acted on by the 
wind, would go from the Canaries to the coast of Caraccas in 
thirteen months ; in forty or fifty days, that it would go 
from Florida to the banks of Newfoundland. Avail 
themselves of it or not, this great River of the Ocean still 
flows on. Whatever its origin, its philosophy, its flow is 
just as mighty, and just as helpful to the seamen. It does 
not need to be understood. It only needs to be used ; to 
be confided in. It is just so with the Atonement. 

" There is a fountain filled with blood, 
Drawn from Immanuers veins." 

What William Cowper found in the Atonement, is there 
for you and for me. Cleansing power ! Healing power ! 
Transforming power ! Inspiring power ! It is the Gulf 
Stream of Salvation ! It is the river which beautifies the 
earth, and makes glad the city of God ! Shall we not 
embark our all upon it ? " As many as receive Him, to 
them gives He power to become the sons of God !" Do 
we want anything better ? Do we want anything else ? 

To-day I begin the labors of my fifteenth year as your 
pastor. I need not tell you how gladly : how sweet 
and holy the work looks to me ; and how unworthy I 
feel to undertake it. I thank you for the long rest 
you have so thoughtfully granted me ; for your undivided 
loyalty to each other, and to this Church ; for all your 



174 THE LAW 0F ADAPTATION IN SPIRITUAL THINGS. 

kindness to me and mine ; for the warmth of your wel- 
come, which I see in your presence, and read in your 
eyes. As I left you, the Angel of God touched one of 
your number and said "come up higher!" I seem to 
hear the echoes of the same message, uttered so recently 
to another, as I greet you again. Let it be the message 
of God Himself to you and to me. If there is a higher 
plane of Christian living, let us seek it. If there is a 
higher plane of Christian service, let us be found there. 
With the shadows of the other world falling upon us ; 
nay, with the glories of the other world coming down 
to meet us ; with the cry of this lost world ringing 
in our ears, let us say of every duty, of every opportu- 
nity, " Here am I, Lord, send me !" 



X. 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 

I John, v. io. — He that believeth on the Son of God hath 
the witness in himself." 

Faith makes us heirs of God ; heirs of God, accord- 
ing to the New Testament of His love ; signed with the 
sign of the Cross, and sealed in the blood of the Lamb. 
But how can we know that this testament is genuine ? 
Where is it written, witnessed, recorded ? Many a 
man makes a will that is stolen, or destroyed, or set aside 
after his death. Many a man is in confidential relations 
with partners, who enter into a conspiracy to rob his 
widow and his fatherless ones before yet the grass has be- 
come green over his sleeping dust. This, notwithstand- 
ing all the formalities and securities which are prescribed 
by law. And the world is full of those who would like 
to prove that God has made no will ; that Christ Jesus 
has signed no will by which the believer may look for and 
claim life and immortality beyond the grave ; who are 
trying to break this last will and testament of the living 
God, and cheat the heirs out of their legitimate inherit- 
ance. Indeed there is, in our day, a general onslaught 
upon it, from right hand and left; from the earth and the 
sea, and the air ; from the firmament and the depths ; 



176 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 



from physical scientists, who claim that the records of 
Nature cannot be reconcilable with the statements of the 
Bible ; from antiquarians, who claim that the monuments 
in Egypt and Assyria cannot be harmonized with the al- 
leged facts of Sacred History ; from students of compar- 
ative religion, who pretend to find nothing in Christianity 
which has not its parallel in some phase or aspect of pa- 
ganism ; from moralists, who challenge the truth of 
the Bible, because of its incorrect decision of great 
moral problems, who claim that they are already 
lifted above the plane of the Bible ; from socialists, who 
discover that nothing so stands in the way of their disor- 
ganizing progress as the Word of God, and even from 
learned Greek and Hebrew scholars, who decide the fate 
of a manuscript from a yoth or an iota, there or not 
there. 

Meanwhile what resort has the poor believer ? Not a 
scholar at all, save in the school of Christ, beset behind 
and before, and with the hand of the antagonists of his 
faith heavily upon him, what is left to him ? Can it be 
that God has not put His last will and testament in some 
secure place, where his signature cannot be tampered with 
or erased ? where the testimony of witnesses cannot be 
wrested or turned aside ? where, whether there be a God, 
and whether Jesus Christ be the Son of God, and whether 
there be a propitiation for the sins of the world, and 
whether he that believeth on the Lord Jesus Christ shall 
be saved, does not depend upon discussions about Yahveh 
and Adhonai ; about the records of the rocks and the re- 
cords of the monuments ; about the comparative value of 
heathenism and Christianity ; about whether the civiliza- 
tion of modern times is on a higher plane than the civil- 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 



177 



ization of that Revelation from God which lifted it there ? 

The answer to these questions is in the text : "He that 
believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself." 
And the subject which I shall discuss is this : 

THE WITNESS WITHIN. 

Just as God writes His law upon the tablets of the soul, 
so Jesus Christ puts His last will and testament in the 
archives of the soul ; puts there the proof of His divine 
Sonship ; ay, also, of our divine sonship. 

I. The inner man is just as real as the outer man. 
Every man has two selves. The self in which he is made 
in the image of God ; can commune with God here ; can 
hope for fellowship with God hereafter in the eternity 
which opens before him ; the self in which lie all his 
religious capacities and susceptibilities. And the other 
self, through which the higher self acts as an inhabitant 
of this material world, whose fashion passes away ; the 
duplicate personality in which he moves about among ob- 
jects of sense ; which insists upon asking the questions, 
"What shall we eat; and what shall we drink; and 
wherewithal shall we be clothed ? " 

Now, I say the inner self is just as real as the outer 
self. If you look at this self in its origin, being inbreathed 
from the lips of the Creator, if you look at this self, as 
to the dignity, the far-reaching results of the decisions 
which it is called upon daily to make ; if you look at it as 
to the alternative destiny which is before it ; blessing or 
cursing, life or death, heaven or hell, it is the reality of 
the two. The outer man is only the husk of the kernel, 
which the hand of death will strip off. 

Here we are in the house of God. God has promised 



i 7 8 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 



to meet us here. He does meet us here. What part 
of us does He meet? Which self does He meet? He 
manifests himself to us, as He does not to the world. 
But how ? The world has no sense of God as has the be- 
liever. We have to open the windows of our inner na- 
ture, and welcome His influences. We have to believe, 
in order to meet God. Within the outer ear there is the 
hearing ear ; the ear to which is addressed that approach 
which is thus described : " Behold ! I stand at the door, 
and knock?" the approach of the King immortal, in- 
visible. He still walks among the golden candlesticks ; 
He that liveth and was dead, md is alive forevermore. 
He knocks where ? He knocks at the door of the inner 
man. There is the outer eye and the inner eye, which 
beholds the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin 
of the world. 

In our inner man we have correspondences with God 
and with eternity ; just like the correspondences which, 
in our outer man, we have with the things of time and 
sense. Through the inner man we posit those, as through 
the outer man we posit these. There has often been ex- 
pressed great regret that no portrait of the man Christ 
Jesus has ever come down to us ; no description of Him, 
out of which an authentic portrait could be made, though 
Romanism professes to have such a portrait, and sells 
copies of it. But that is not all that is true. The de- 
scriptions of Him in the Bible relate to the inner man. 
" And the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." 
It begins as though we might have a material description. 
But no ; it goes on : "And we beheld His glory, the glory 
as of the only begotten of the Father ; full of grace and 
truth." They beheld the beaming out of the things of 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 



179 



the inner man ; they beheld in Him the image of the 
Father. 

At the International Exposition now open in Boston 
there is a painting which represents a beautiful young 
woman, a member jf some religious order apparently, 
surrounded by Roman Catholic officials and masons with 
brick and mortar, who, with a scanty allowance of food, 
is about to be walled into a cell. It makes you almost 
shudder to look at it. The other day, in this city, the 
daily papers gave us an account of one who took the 
white veil, and became, as it was termed, a bride of 
heaven. The minute description reminded me of that 
picture, whether fiction or fact. Is it not strange that while 
the Lord Jesus became incarnate, came into flesh and 
blood, was born of a woman, took Himself out of His 
immediate celestial relations, and came into earthly ones, 
to show us how to live; we should think it following Him 
to immure ourselves away from those whose burdens we 
may help to bear ; to incarcerate ourselves away from our 
own flesh and blood ; to put brick walls and iron grat- 
ings between ourselves and God's sunlight, and God's 
pure air ? "And the word was made flesh and dwelt 
among us." These were the earthly conditions of the 
spirituality of the Man Cirist Jesus ; not the monastery 
or the convent. 

The very idea of a revelation from God implies this in- 
ner man. The biographies of the Bible, while they give us 
earthly localities and incidents, give all these things as in- 
cidentals. Biography is the history of a life, and the truest 
life of any creature bearing God's image is his inner life ; so 
that Bible biography is the only true biography until the 
Day of Judgment, It is the life of the inner man which 



i8o 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 



the Bible records ; the life of man in his relation to his 
conscience ; in relation to God ; in relation to the awards 
of the day of accounts. Enoch walked with God. He, 
moved on with God, as God moves on his high affairs ; 
that is, he walked on those heights of spiritual life where 
God meets us, and walks with us. He kept the windows 
of his soul open toward the Jerusalem which is from 
above. 

George Eliot has an essay on the poet Young, the au- 
thor of "The Night Thoughts," which she ironically en- 
titles, " Worldliness, or Other-Worldliness." The life of 
Enoch was worldl)', respecting the other world, just as 
many of our lives are worldly respecting this world. 
And his life of other-worldliness pleased God, and God 
told him so. " For, before his translation, he had this 
testimony that he pleased God." In the last analysis, 
only that person pleases God whose inner life pleases Him. 
" Without faith it is impossible to please Him." Faith 
is the organ of the inner man ; the one spiritual sense 
which is the avenue of all those gifts and graces which 
come from God, the Father of spirits. Faith is the only 
organ by which we can approach the boarder lands which 
lie between earth and heaven. Enoch's walk with God 
was by faith. Faith brought him into society with God, 
into agreement with God, into fellowship with Him, took 
Him where God was and is forevermore. 

There are some organic beings which have but one or- 
gan with many functions. They are in the lower organic 
forms of creation. But faith is the one organ by which 
the inner man keeps his hold on things not seen, and 
eternal; sees Him who is invisible, yes who cannot be seen; 
weighs things, which are else imponderable ; lays up things 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 



181 



which perish not with the using ; feeds on the Bread which 
comes down from heaven ; assimilates it, grows from it 
into God's likeness. We are to be judged by our works ; 
but works are no substitute for faith. Works that do not 
spring from faith are dead works ; are like the movement 
of the organs of one undergoing convulsions ; or of dead 
organs, momentarily galvanized. They will not enter 
into the estimate when we are judged. You cannot prove 
faith by dead works. Dead works only prove a dead 
man. It is the works of the inner man which are to 
justify us when we stand before God. Just as the brick 
walls, in which one is immured, cannot shut out the vision 
of this world ; the voices of this world ; ay, the appetites 
and desires of this world ; just as in the cell of the con- 
vent, the soul may be followed and flooded by things 
forbidden ; by thoughts and images, which are a tempta- 
tion and a snare ; so, in this flesh and blood, in this 
framework of red earth, into which God breathed, and 
man became a living soul : the inner man may mount 
upon wings as an eagle ; the wings of God's ministers, 
that do His pleasure in glory ; may run and not be weary ; 
may walk and not faint. Abel and Enoch and Abraham ; 
Isaac and Sarah and Jacob and Joseph ; Moses and 
Joshua and Rahab ; Gideon and Barak and Samson and 
Jephthah ; and David and Samuel ; their biographies are 
the life of a soul, as Dr. Bushnell expresses it. They hang 
in the spiritual portrait galleries of the divine Artist. 

The testimony of the inner man is just as reliable as 
the testimony of the outer man. There are events, which 
transpire in the life of the outer man, which are the sub- 
jects of record. When the stripling David went out to 
meet Goliath of Gath, he took his shepherd's sling and 



182 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 



five smooth stones from the brook. It was his armament 
of faith. But the outer man was involved in this act, as 
well as the inner man ; and, when in the name of God 
of battles, whom Goliath had defied, he let one of those 
stones loose from his sling, it was the act of his whole- 
some, symmetrical outer man, as well as the act of his 
faith ; the organ of his inner man. He was conscious 
that he flung that stone : but he was no less conscious 
that it was an act of faith. A man breaks his arm, or dis- 
locates his limb. He knows that this casualty pertains to 
the outer man. He is conscious of it ; as we say. In- 
telligence of this physical disturbance is communicated at 
once to what the ancients called the sensorium, the central 
office of the nervous system, where all reports of injury 
done to the outer man are made. 

A man offends his conscience ; is he not conscious of 
it ? A man offends the God to whom His conscience 
corresponds ; the God in whose hand his breath is ; is he 
not conscious of it ? When David met this earthly antag- 
onist, it was face to face of the outward man ; it was to 
try conclusions with him, in material prowess. And in 
the name of the God of battles, he got the victory. But 
when the same David, in later life, went down before a 
great temptation, when he brought dishonor upon the 
name of the God, in whose name he had won that other 
victory, think you there was no inward testimony to that 
disaster ? Is the injury a man receives, when he sprains 
his ankle, at once telegraphed to the central office within, 
and the injury done to God's image within him, too im- 
palpable to be a matter of record ? 

When Jacob lies down to sleep at Bethel, he is alone. 
During the watches of the night, angels descend from 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 



183 



Heaven on a ladder, at the foot of which is pillowed his 
head. At the summit of the ladder, stands one, who says, 
" I am the Lord God of Abraham, thy Father, and the 
God of Isaac ; the land, whereon thou liest, to thee will 
I give it : and to thy seed ; and thy seed shall be as the 
dust of the earth ; and thou shalt spread abroad to the 
West, and to the East, and to the North, and to the South; 
and in thee and in thy seed, shall all the families of 
the earth be blessed. And behold I am with thee, and 
will keep thee in all places whither thou goest ; and I 
will bring thee again into this land ; for I will not leave 
thee, until I have done that, which I have spoken to thee 
of." Jacob awakes. He is still alone. Does he conclude 
that this, which his inner eye has seen ; this pathway of 
glory, trodden by winged messengers ; this message, 
which his inner ear has heard ; is unreal ? Of all that 
scene, nothing is left but the rocks, on one of which his 
head was pillowed, when this unexpected vision broke 
upon him. Nothing left, did I say ? It is all left. Noth- 
ing is lost. All that is now seen is there. This is his 
first exclamation : " Surely, the Lord is in this place, and 
I knew it not. How dreadful is this place.' This is 
none other but the house of God ; and this is the gate of 
Heaven ! " And acting in that transaction of the night ; 
that transaction addressed to his inner man ; he converts 
the stone, on which his head was pillowed into an altar ; 
anoints it with oil ; calls the place the house of God ; 
and enters into covenant with God, that He shall be his 
God. 

Was that a real experience ? Did Jacob see these angels 
ascending and descending ? Did he hear those words, 
which seemed to come from the very lips of Jehovah Him- 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 



self? Those who deny the supernatural ; who do not 
know whether there be any God ; who deny that the 
spirit of man can commune with the Spirit of God ; who 
believe that we are wholly creatures of sense ; and that 
even what pass among men for mental and spiritual pro- 
cesses, are really the result of certain physical conditions ; 
as the clouds rise from earth's exhalations ; have their 
ready explanation of this dream of Jacob. It is all ac- 
counted for from his physical condition and surround- 
ings. He had just left his father's house ; the presence 
of his mother. In a certain sense, he was an exile. He 
was very susceptible and tender. As he laid down to 
rest in his loneliness, he yearned for some token, that 
good fortune was before him. Perhaps, before falling 
asleep, he lay looking up into the clear sky over his head, 
and fell to building castles in the air. As his sight grew 
dim, the huge rocks, that lay piled up before him, seemed 
converted into a staircase ; and soon, as he began to 
dream, there seemed to be angel visitors, flitting back- 
ward and forth, as from the open gateway of Heaven ; 
and what the dreamer was fain to believe was in store for 
him, it was natural for him to attribute to the unseen Be- 
ing, in whom he believed. If Jacob had met any other 
being but God, there would have been no doubt of the 
reality of the event. But that God, who has made man 
in His own image, has access to avenues, which lead into 
His spirit, does really come to him, and speak to him ■ 
does counsel and comfort him within, is a thing incredible. 
God has made men so they can speak to each other. We, 
who are fathers and mothers, can speak to our children; 
but God, who is the Father of our spirits; God, who has 
made man for His own glory, is a deaf-mute. He can 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 



neither hear nor speak. The sign-language of nature is 
all there is for us and for him. This is the new religion, 
which we are urged to believe. 

Turn now, for a moment, from the Old Dispensation to 
the New ; from the patriarch Jacob, to the Apostle Paul. 
Centuries later, here comes a descendant of that dreamer 
at Bethel ; of that Jacob, who said, " The Lord shall be 
my God ! " He comes, breathing out threatenings, and 
slaughter against the little company of believers in Jesus. 
The time is ripe for a fulfillment of that promise to Jacob. 
"In thy seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed." 
And on the road to Damascus there is another coming to- 
gether of the spirit of man and the Spirit of God. This 
is the Apostle's own account of it: "Whereupon as I 
went to Damascus, with authority and commission from 
the Chief Priest ; at midday, O King, I saw in the way, 
a light from Heaven, above the brightness of the sun, 
shining round about me and them that journeyed with 
me. And when we were all fallen to the earth, I heard 
a voice speaking unto me, and saying in the Hebrew 
tongue, " Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me ? It is 
hard for thee to kick against the pricks." And I said, 
"Who art thou, Lord ?" And he said, "I am Jesus, 
whom thou persecutest. But, rise, and stand upon thy 
feet. For I have appeared unto thee, for this purpose, to 
make thee a minister and a witness, both of those things 
which thou hast seen, and of those things, in the which 
I will appear unto thee." 

This is at midday, upon the highway, and in the pres- 
ence of witnesses, who, like St. Paul himself, are all 
stricken to the earth. And it is so real a thing, that it 
changes the whole direction of the Apostle's life. He is 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 



not disobedient to the Heavenly vision. Was it likely 
that a Hebrew of the Hebrews, a Pharisee, one greatly 
honored of the highest Court of his nation ; then under 
commission from this Court to arrest and bring to punish- 
ment the new converts to Christianity ; was it a likely 
thing, that from a temporary hallucination, from a delu- 
sion which he practiced on himself, or the result of some 
physical disturbance, this revolution in character and life 
<vould take place? Is it not clear to any candid mind, 
that St. Paul believed that his call came directly from 
God ? Did he not act as though this were the case ? 

In the experience of both Jacob and St. Paul, these 
supernatural interviews ; these face-to-face communings 
with God, are the key to their after lives. Their lives 
are not intelligible, on any other principle, than that God 
met them as the Bible represents. It is the point of de- 
parture, to which they always refer. St. Paul always puts 
it into his experience ; and God says to Jacob, when 
Laban's countenance is against him : " I am the God of 
Bethel, where thou anointedst a pillar, and vowedest a 
vow unto me." 

III. Let us consider what is the testimony of the be- 
liever's inner man ; what is the witness within ? What is 
meant by the statement of the text, " He that believeth 
on the Son of God hath the witness in Himself." 

In the context the discussion is respecting the divinity, 
the divine Sonship of the Lord Jesus Christ. And the first 
meaning of the passage is, that " He that believeth on 
the Son of God," hath in himself, the proof of Christ's 
divinity. You remember what the neighbors of the 
woman of Samaria said to her, after they had themselves 
heard Jesus preach : " Now, we believe, not because of 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 



I8 7 



thy saying ; for we have heard Him ourselves, and know 
that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world." 
The evil spirits recognized Jesus Christ as the Son of God; 
as their final Judge. They had an intuition, which testi- 
fied of Him. This is the meaning of those words from 
two of them, whom He met coming out of the tombs, in 
the country of the Gergesenes : " What have we to do 
with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God ? Art thou come 
hither to torment us before the time ?" They knew His 
name ; they knew His office. And every converted man, 
every man whose sins have been forgiven, has had experi- 
mental proof, proof within his own soul, that the Being, 
for whose sake he has been forgiven, is the Son of God. 
When Jesus said to the sick of palsy, " Son, thy sins be 
forgiven thee ! " the Scribes took exception to it, saying, 
" Who can forgive sins but God only?" There was that 
passage in Isaiah : " I, even I, am He that blotteth out 
thy transgressions for my own sake." For the Son's sake 
and for the Father's sake. No man to whom the Son of 
God has ever said, " Son, thy sins be forgiven thee," can 
ever afterwards doubt His divinity. For every man 
thoroughly convinced of sin, believes with the Psalmist : 
" Against thee, thee only have I sinned, and done this 
evil in thy sight." He feels that his sins have all ended 
in God. They are of no earthly or finite interpretation. 
Nor can man nor angel absolve him ; only God Himself. 

The testimony to Christ's divinity is internal : is writ- 
ten within every forgiven soul. The chaos of the old 
nature has been broken up ; and order prevails there. A 
voice has said within, " Let there be light ! " and there is 
light. A voice has said, " Peace, be still ;" and there is 
a great calm ; like the going down of a storm. The for- 



i88 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 



given soul is conscious of forgiveness ; nay, rather he is 
conscious first of the Being who forgives ; though of for- 
giveness, the name of Him, who has said, " Him that 
cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out." This divine 
function of forgiveness, the Judge, the Son of Man, has 
already exercised within his soul. When, upon the Jewish 
Sabbath, the Saviour healed the man born blind, the 
Pharisees tried to silence his confession. They said, 
" Why, this man is a sinner ; this man, we do not know 
whence he is." The reply was, " Whether he be a sinner 
or no, I know not ; one thing I know, that whereas I 
was blind, now I see ! " "Why, herein is a marvelous 
thing, that ye know not from whence He is ; and yet, 
He hath opened mine eyes. Now, we know that God 
heareth not sinners ; but, if any man be a worshipper of 
God, and doeth His will, him He heareth. Since the 
world began, was it not heard, that any man opened the 
eyes of one born blind. If this man were not of God, 
he could do nothing." He had experienced the Saviour's 
divine power. 

Every lost man needs a divine Saviour. And when 
that Saviour, comes, yes, when He takes away his alien- 
ation from God, his restlessness, his relish for sin, his 
purpose to please himself ; when He reveals the Almighty 
as merciful and gracious, though He will by no means 
clear the guilty ; when he sheds abroad within his soul 
the Spirit of adoption, through whom he cries, " Abba, 
Father ! " he cannot but recognize this divine Visitor ; 
this Daysman, this Mediator between God and himself; 
this Lamb of God, wounded for our transgressions ; 
bruised for our iniquities ; upon whom the chastisement 
of our peace is laid ; and with whose stripes we are 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 1 89 

healed ; this Lamb of God that takes away the sin of 
the world. Then let the scientists come and try to prove 
to him that there is nothing which cannot be cognized by 
the senses ; that the supernatural is an impossibility ; let 
the antiquarians come, and from inscriptions on tablets 
and monuments, let them try to disturb his faith in these 
divine oracles ; let the man learned in the sacred books 
of the heathen come with their wise sayings, which, as 
they claim, antedate or eclipse the wisdom of his Master ; 
ay, let the moralists and the socialists, and the represent- 
atives of the higher criticism, who test the Bible, as a 
man would test a chest of tea, by taking up a pinch of it 
between his thumb and finger ; ay, let them all come, 
with their array of arguments and difficulties. He has 
his Father's will hid in the archives of his own soul. It 
does not shake his faith in the least. The Spirit of God 
has spoken a word to him, that he never can forget. 
Faith on the Son of God has united him to Him, who 
died on Calvary indeed, but who is alive forevermore ! 
And just as Jacob looked back to that Bethel, where 
Heaven came down to meet him ; and St. Paul to that 
highway to Damascus, where Jesus met Him ; this man, 
this believer has within him a witness, a testimony to the 
power of the Son of God, to forgive sin, which, though 
heaven and earth pass away, he can never lose. He has 
experienced it. He has found out, by personal trial, by 
personal faith, what there is for him in the Son of God. 

There is an abstract, a philosophical way of looking at 
God, as in general, our Father ; as in general not willing 
that we should perish ; there is a way of partly leaning 
on His promises, and partly leaning on our own philos- 
ophy ; which is not rewarded by the witness within ; the 



igo 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 



testimony within, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God ; 
or by that which is an inference from it, namely, that since 
this Saviour of ours is thus divine, we have a right to be 
called the sons of God. This testimony varies in different 
believers. It varies in the same believer at different times. 
For the liveliness of it depends upon our Christian char- 
acter ; depends upon our closeness of walk with God. 

" He that belie veth on the Son of God hath the witness 
in himself." There is an entire surrender of self; body, 
soul and spirit to God ; there is a life, hid with Christ in 
God ; there is a living, moving and breathing in God, to 
which there is the answering consciousness, that we are 
accepted in the Father's Beloved One. God's ministry to 
us, through angels has ceased. They no longer descend 
to us, as on a ladder of light. In these last days, God 
has spoken unto us by His Son. He spoke thus to Saul 
of Tarsus. He speaks thus, to you and me. If any man 
hear His voice and will open the door, He will come in 
and sup with him. And where this blessed Guest shall 
sup, in that soul, He shall be the witness that one is the 
son of God. 

Oft I've heard a voice within, 
Gently chiding me for sin; 
Saying early, saying late : 
" Lo ! I'm knocking at the gate ! 
I the Man at Bethl'em born, 
I the Man, with crown of thorn ; 
Waiting for one word from thee : 
" Ingredere, Domine ! " 

To this voice, what shall I say ? 
Shall I turn from it away ? 
Shall I say, again, depart, 



THE WITNESS WITHIN. 



Shutting up my close-barred heart ? 
It is He, who gives me breath ! 
He for me who tasted death ; 
Waiting for one word from me ? 
" Ingredere, Domine ! " 

Enter, Master ! Hear the word ! 
Long thy voice I've silent heard. 
Stand no more without my soul ; 
Purify and make it whole : 
Be, henceforth the witness there, 
That thy Father's love I share : 
Sup with me, aud I with thee : 
" Ingredere, Domine ! " 

Enter, Master, hear the word ; 
For thy love my soul has stirred ; 
As on chaos and old night, 
Speak the words : " Let there be light 
To my storm and strength of will, 
Say, again, thou : " Peace, be still ! " 
This, thy realm ; its sovereign be : 
" Ingredere, Domine ! " 



XI. 



MAR TIN L UTHER. 

2 Kings, xiii, 21. — "And it came to pass, as they were bury- 
ing a man, that behold they spied a band of men, and they cast 
the man into the sepulchre of Elisha ; and when the man was let 
down and touched the bones of Elisha, he revived and stood upon 
his feet." 

There is more life in the dead bones of some men than 
in the living flesh and blood of others ; nay, there is 
more life in their dead bones than in their own living 
flesh and blood. Martin Luther is a thousand fold 
mightier to-day than ever before. He lived among men 
only sixty-three years. This lifetime of his was the ful- 
crum on which he rested his lever when he moved the 
world. Between his birth at Eisleben, at midnight, Nov.. 
ioth, 1483, and his death, at the same Eisleben, at mid- 
night, Feb. 1 8th, 1546, were crowded words and deeds 
which will grow greener with immortality ; which will 
make his name more fragrant till time shall be no more. 

This celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of 
his birth, which belts Christendom ; why does it stir men 
so ? What does it mean ? We touch again the dead 
bones of this German Elisha. The world revives, and 
stands upon its feet. It means that what Luther said and 
did has entered into the life of the Christian Church of 
every denomination in all ages ; in all climes. This 



202 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



German Elisha? This Elisha of humanity. It is four hun- 
dred years this very November the ioth since Luther was 
born ; accidentally born, as men talk, in Saxony. 

" Strange enough to reflect on it," says Thomas Carlyle, 
" this poor Frau Luther had gone with her husband Hans 
to Eisleben Winter Fair to make her small merchandis- 
ings, perhaps to sell the lock of yarn she had been spin- 
ning, to buy the small winter necessaries for her narrow 
hut or hour ehold. In the whole world that day there was 
not a more entirely unimportant looking pair of people 
than this miner and his wife. And yet, what were all 
emperors, popes, and potentates in comparison ? There 
was born here, amid the tumult of this scene, a mighty 
man, whose light was to flame as a beacon over long cen- 
turies and epochs of the world. The whole world and 
its history was waiting for this man. It is strange ; it is 
great. It leads us back to another birth hour, in a still 
meaner environment, eighteen hundred years ago, of 
which it is fit that we say nothing ; that we think only 
in silence. For what words are there ? The ages of mir- 
acles past ! The age of miracles is forever here." 

MARTIN LUTHER — THE HIDING OF HIS POWER, AND THE 
DEBT WE OWE HIM. 

I. What was the hiding of this man's power ? Alone, 
he was pitted against the mightiest antagonist man ever 
encountered, and he not only conquered, but he intro- 
duced the principle of his victory into all the future. 
When he was born, the Romish Church covered one- 
quarter of the earth's surface ; the other three-quarters 
were occupied by Pagans and Mohammedans. To-day, 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



203 



four hundred years later, the principles of the Reforma- 
tion are to Romanism as fourteen is to nine. That is, 
fourteen millions of square miles of the earth's surface 
are dominated by the principles of Religious Freedom, 
as represented by Martin Luther, against nine millions 
dominated by the system which he confronted. But that 
is not all. The nations which stand in the forefront of 
the world's onward movement ; that have introduced the 
principles of civil and religious freedom into their con- 
stitutions ; that are distinguished for advance in thought, 
in the arts and sciences ; that go on from conquering to 
conquer ; such as England, Germany, the United States ; 
these nations are Protestant. 

1. Martin Luther was a sincere man. There is a great 
deal said about sincerity that is a delusion ; as though a 
sincere belief of error were just as good as a sincere be- 
lief of truth. But the worse the error believed, the more 
dangerous the sincerity. The advantage of sincerity is 
this : that God is in covenant with it ; that a sincere man 
is going to be led by God's hand into larger views of the 
truth, and larger opportunities of duty. Doubtless Mar- 
tin Luther was just as sincere, when he was climbing on 
his knees up Pilate's Staircase in Rome, as when he nailed 
the 95 theses to the church door at Witfpmberg. He 
only had that dim light in which to walk " The meek 
will He guide in judgment ; the meek wih He teach His 
way." And the voice that came to him as he was there 
upon his knees was proof that God recognized his 
sincerity. The climbing of that staircase was between 
the monk's cell and the pulpit of the Reformer. It was 
the act of a sincere man. And so was his rising from 
his knees at the words : " The just shall live by faith." 



204 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



I heard Father Hecker, of New York, lecture once on 
Martin Luther. It was in the city of Boston. Many of 
his hearers were Protestants, and he adopted this ingeni- 
ous, somewhat Jesuitical, method of treating the subject. 
He admitted that the Roman Catholic Church in Luther's 
time needed reformation. He claimed that it was ready 
for reformation. And he complained of Luther for not 
staying in it, and reforming it from within. Doubtless 
Luther intended just this. He was too quiet and humble 
a man to intend anything more. But he found it im- 
possible, and he was too sincere a man not to see it. 
Jonah might as well have tried to reform the stomach of 
the whale. Every step Luther took was the step of a sin- 
cere man. He went forward step by step as he got new 
light. It was being brought face to face with death and 
the judgment, as he was, by he stroke of lightning which 
smote down his friend Alexis at his side, that decided him 
to adopt a religious life. His father, who' had destined 
him to the law, plead with him in vain. Hans Luther 
did not want his boy to become a lazy, do-nothing priest. 
That Erfurth University Library had a book which Luther 
had never seen, and this is the way God brought him to 
that book. Vigils, masses, convent life do not give him 
rest. That Latin Bible, which has nothing to say about 
such things, which deals with far other things ; that Latin 
Bible, neglected by all the rest, but simply the Bread of Life 
to him; the heart of God in it. He soon gets at the heart of 
God in it. In Luther's stay in the University and Convent 
at Erfurth I find only this : God's method of bringing a 
sincere man, a meek and humble man, who wanted noth- 
ing but God ; who wanted only to be assured of the forgive- 
ness of his sins in God's way ; a great childlike nature. 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



205 



hungering for righteousness ; God's method of bringing 
this Augustine monk into citizenship in His Kingdom. 

It is a true theory that that which is wisdom for a man 
in his relation to God, is always wisdom for him in his 
relation to man. It was Luther's restlessness respecting 
his own spiritual state and destiny ; it was his determina- 
tion to be at peace with God on the only basis of peace 
could he but find it ; that made him the great man that 
he was ; that introduced him to the grand role which 
God had prepared for him. He sought first the Kingdom 
of ( rod and His righteousness, and all these things were 
added to him. At the age of 22 he took his degree of 
Master of Arts at the University of Erfurth, then the most 
celebrated in Germany. D'Aubigne says it was a most 
magnificent festival. A procession by torchlight came 
forth to do him honor. But he turned away from all 
preferment in this direction, to do the yeoman's work 
which God had for him to do. The highest seat in the 
civil courts of his native land ; reputation for learning 
and wisdom ; suppose these were at his command ; what 
were they compared with what came to him, because he only 
went forward, doing the next thing which God gave him 
to do ? It is a lesson for every young man who wants 
success in life. 

2. Luther was an independent man. There are some 
men made so that they can stand alone like an obelisk. 
It was not a desirable controversy, that with the Pope of 
Rome. Well might Luther even dread it ; draw back 
from it. How many years had it been since John Huss 
had been burned at the stake singing Kyiie Eleison ? 
In 1415. Yes, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of 
the church. Eut sometimes the soil of the church needs 



206 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



breaking up, in order to catch the seed, and here was the 
plowman. The time had come when the church more 
needed the life and the brave words of a martyr than his 
blood. Some one must arise who had the courage to re- 
si: t the authority of the church ; to confront the argu- 
ments of the church ; to explode the fallacies of the 
church ; to put the Bible into the language of the peo- 
ple. There are many men who are sincere that are not 
independent. They cannot stand the shock of opposi- 
tion. They have to consult their contemporaries ; theii 
circumstances ; the probable result of their decisions. 
They form an opinion, and then submit it to the judg- 
ment of others, to see whether it is wise or not. Luther 
could stand alone. 

At Naumburg, on his way to the Diet of Worms, a 
priest met him with a portrait of Jerome Savonarola, who 
was burned at the stake in 1498, when Luther was fifteen 
years old, as if to intimate that such would be his fate. 
"It is Satan," said Luther, " that would prevent by these 
terrors the confession of the truth in the assembly of 
princes, for he foresees the blow it would inflict on his 
kingdom." Crowds came out to meet him ; to look at 
the man who was going into the lion's mouth. "Ah," 
said some, " there are so many bishops and cardinals at 
Worms ; they will burn you, and reduce your body to 
ashes as they did with John Huss." This was Luther's 
answer : " Though they should kindle a fire all the way 
from Worms to Wittemberg, the flames of which reached 
to Heaven, I would walk through it in the name of the 
Lord Jesus. I would appear before them. I would enter 
the jaws of this Behemoth, and break his teeth, confes- 
sing the Lord Jesus Christ." Then came the caution of 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



his best friend, Shalatin, who already apprehended that 
the safe-conduct given to Luther would not be kept 
sacred. " Do not enter Worms." But Luther turned to 
the messenger and said : " Go and tell your master that 
even should there be as many devils in Worms as tiles on 
the house-tops, still I would enter it." And then in that 
memorable assembly where, first in German and then in 
Latin, he has made his defense, and is asked by the Chan- 
cellor of Treves, "Will you, or will you not retract? " 
this is his reply : " I cannot, and will not retract. Hier 
stehe ich ; ich kann nich anders ; Gott helfe mir. Amen." 
" Here I stand ; I can do no other ; may God help me. 
Amen." 

Here was the turning-point in Luther's career, say 
some. No, it was no turning-point, but only another 
step forward of this sincere man. seeking to know and 
do the will of God. Says D'Aubigne : " Firm as a rock, 
the waves of human power dashed ineffectually against 
him. The strength of his words, his bold bearing, his 
piercing eyes, the unshaken firmness legible in the rough 
outlines of his truly German features, had produced the 
deepest impression on this illustrious assembly. There 
was no longer any hope. The monk had vanquished 
those great ones of the earth. He had said No, to the 
church and to the empire." 

3. Luther's power was hid in God. D'Aubigne has 
said, " Perhaps Luther was the only man that felt tran- 
quil at Worms." It was because he was nearest to God. 
God was tranquil. He got his tranquility not from that 
grand nature of his, craggy and deep-rooted, like a moun- 
tain ; not from his native courage and independence, 
though he was wonderfully constituted in these respects. 



208 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



His peace was the peace of God, that passeth all under- 
standing. Just listen to his prayer the morning of April 
18th, for, his sun that morning rose behind a cloud: " My 
God, art Thou dead ? No, Thou canst not die. Thou 
hidest Thyself only. Thou hast chosen me for this work, 
I know it well. Act, then, Oh God. Stand by my side, 
for the sake of Thy well -beloved Jesus Christ, who is my 
Defence, my Shield, my strong Tower!" After a mo- 
ment of silent struggle, he goes on : " Lord, where stay- 
est Thou ? Oh, my God, where art Thou ? Come, come, 
I am ready. I am ready to lay down my life for Thy 
truth, patient as a lamb. For it is the cause of justice ; 
it is Thine. I will never separate myself from Thee ; 
neither now, nor through eternity. And though the 
world should be full of devils, and though my body, 
which is still the work of Thy hands, should be slain, 
should be stretched on the pavement, be cut to pieces, 
reduced to ashes, my soul is Thine. Yes, I have the as- 
surance of Thy Word. My soul belongs to Thee. It 
shall al}ide forever with Thee. Amen. Oh, God, help 
me. Amen." 

Though Luther was an independent man, this shows 
us that his dependence was upon God. His talk about a 
fire kindled from Worms to Wittemberg ; about devils 
thick as tiles upon the house-tops ; was not the offspring 
of his sturdy animal nature ; of his carnal spirit of an- 
tagonism, though he says he was at his best when he was 
angry. It was because he lost himself in God. Review- 
ing these events, said Luther a few days before his death, 
" I was then undaunted. I feared nothing. God can 
indeed render a man intrepid at any time. But I know 
not whether I should now have so much liberty and joy." 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



209 



There are men called independent who are not so. 
They want a party behind them ; somebody to stand by 
and cheer them on. No man can be utterly and wholly 
independent who is not in solemn league with the only 
Being in the universe who is independent. Luther be- 
lieved that God knew His own affairs, and knew Luther's 
affairs as well. What was the Pope to God ? What was 
the Emperor? What were legions of high ecclesiastics? 
He waited two long hours without the hall at Worms, 
among the crowd, that were dashing around him like the 
tumult of the great seas. As alone in that august as- 
semblage, future generations looking on, he gave his 
answer to the Pope's representatives, he thought of no 
being but God ; he leaned upon no being but God. Had 
he been different ; less trustful, less brave, less himself, less 
alone with God, how it would have marred all the future ; 
our future, as well as his. 

Luther, then, was a sincere man. What he wanted to 
know was the truth. His soul's eye turned to that as the 
needle to the pole. When he found it, he would be loyal 
to it. He was an independent mm. If the truth took 
him to Worms, and if beyond Worms was the stake, as 
to John Huss and Savanarola, he knew no other way. It 
was the beckoning of God. For Luther was a man of 
God, a man whom God raised up and anointed, and 
put forward to do something for which humanity was 
waiting. This is the secret of the man. The test of a 
man is always moral ; what he is, and what he does as to 
conscience, as to God. Ten thousand other things may 
be said of this Luther. But they are all incidents. They 
are all like the floating objects which a mighty current 
takes up and bears on its boson seaward. He was a stu- 



2IO 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



dent of the Bible, a theologian, a poet, a musician • he 
had grand proportions, and would have been Martin Lu- 
ther anywhere. But what determined Luther's life-work 
was that God was with him. This shaped all his move- 
ments. This dignified the commonplace things of his 
life. This softened and sweetened and glorified his work. 
And this is why fjur centuries, in their descendants, rise 
up and call him blessed. 

II. Let us consider the debt we owe him ; more espe- 
cially as to religious freedom. No man can be such a 
man as Luther was without bringing future generations 
in debt to him. There has not a man been born upon 
the face of the earth since the days of Luther who has 
not owed him a debt ; a personal debt. St. Paul said he 
was a debtor to all men. By that very law all men were 
debtors to him. It was a strange incident this which one 
historian records. It took place as Luther entered the 
city of Worms. " On a sudden, a man dressed in a sin- 
gular costume, and bearing a large cross, such as is em- 
ployed in funeral processions, made way through the 
crowd, advanced toward Luther, and then with a loud 
voice, and in that plaintive, measured tone in which mass 
is said for the repose of the soul, he sang these words, as 
if he were uttering them from the abode of the dead : 

'Advenisti, O desiderabilis ! 

4 Quern expectabamus in tenebris,' 

" It was the court fool of one of the dukes of Bavaria. 
But the shouts of the multitude soon drowned the De 
Profundis of the cross-bearer. Quite another welcome, 
and yet in the same words, has all humanity extended 
him : ' Thou hast come, oh desired one, whom in our 
darkness, we were awaiting ! ' " 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



211 



i. Luther stood, in the first place, for the right of pri- 
vate judgment, as against all superior authority. The 
Papal Church said, think what I think, or stop thinking. 
This is what Luther answered to the Chancellor of Treves, 
the counsellor of the Diet of Worms, when asked if he 
would retract : " Since your most serene majesty, and 
your mighty highnesses require from me a clear, simple, 
and precise answer, I will give you one, and it is this : I 
cannot submit my faith, either to the Pope or the Coun- 
cils, because it is clear as the day that they have fre- 
quently erred and contradicted each other." A man's 
faith is the most individual thing, the most sacred thing 
he has. There is no greater affront which you can offer 
him than to say, " I accord you liberty to dress as you 
please, to eat what you please, and drink what you please, 
but when you come to your relations to God the Father 
of your spirit, and to Jesus Christ, the Judge of the quick 
and the dead, -you must believe just which I tell you." This 
was the position of the Romish Church then, and she was 
then the Church of Christendom. 

I believe in creeds in religion just as I believe in rules 
in mathematics ; just as I believe in rock-ribs in a moun- 
tain, or bone-ribs in a man ; as the formulated statement 
of principles, and as of value according as they contain the 
truth. There is a great deal of bugbear talk in these 
days about creeds, with which I have no sympathy. There 
is no sense in it. A man who believes nothing is nobody. 
A man who does not know what he believes, is next to 
nobody. Luther did not reject the dicta of Pope and 
Councils because he had no faith, but because he had 
faith. The right of private judgment ? Yes, of private 
judgment, as of a man who has not to give account of 




212 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



himself to man, to church, but to God. Men err, bodies 
of men err, men progress in their interpretation of the 
truth, and men backslide into error. Besides, if a man 
makes a mistake here, no man can take the penalty, the 
disability, but himself ; no Pope, no church. It is an 
awful thing, the responsibility, which some religious 
teachers assume, that of dictating just what their follow- 
ers shall believe. As though they could guarantee that, 
believing this, their eternity is secure. The late Hon. E. 
B. French told me of a friend of his who, to his surprise, 
became a Roman Catholic. When asked the reason, the 
answer was : " Why, I had no time to give to such mat- 
ters. They told me I had only to assent to such and 
such things, to pay such and such sums of money, and it 
would be all right with me." Think of it ; the awful 
guarantee that mortals undertake to give, that if a man 
take unquestioned what the church prescribes, his soul is 
safe ; he can stand in God's great day ; she has a dip- 
loma for that ! 

" No," says Martin Luther, " she has no such diploma ; 
that is quackery, and I will expose it. Truth is not a 
bolus to be put up in pill-boxes, and passed out by the 
church to apothecary bishops, and administered by doc- 
tor priests to the sick people. Truth is something be- 
tween every man's soul and his Creator, the Father of 
truth. Truth for me, Martin Luther, is what I have found 
out to be true, as between my soul and God ; what my 
soul needs to comfort and inspire it ; what it eats, and I 
live. God has not left the test of the truth with majori- 
ties ; with establishments. God has given to me, Martin 
Luther, eyes of my own, and I see ; a mind of my own, 
and I think ; a tongue of my own, and I speak; a pen 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



213 



of my own, and I write. Popes ! What they have be- 
lieved or not believed, they must stand or fall for this to 
their own Master ; I to mine." 

I admit that religious liberty may run mad ; that in 
matters of religion, people may do just what Paris did, 
when, in the name of Liberty and Equality, she drank 
herself drunk with the blood of her own citizens ; hav- 
ing rejected the authority of kings, she came at last to 
despise all authority, even that of Liberty itself. I can 
see an exact analogy between Ingersollism and Red Re- 
publicanism. But for all that I say, " Let man be free, 
and give an account to God for the use he makes of his 
freedom." Some men maim themselves, take their own 
lives, take the lives of other men. Shall we put all men 
into straight-jackets and give them a keeper for this? 

2. Luther stood for the Word of God as the only in- 
fallible rule in religious thought and life. The Word of 
God, the Bible. He, that great hungry-hearted soul ; 
he lived to be twenty years old before he ever saw one. 
" One day," says D'Aubigne, "he had then been two 
years at Erfurth, and was twenty years old, he opens 
many books in the library to learn their author's names. 
One volume that he comes to, attracts his attention. Pie 
has never till this hour seen its like. He reads the title ; 
it is a Bible, a rare book, unknown in those times. His 
interest is greatly excited. Pie is filled with astonish- 
ment at finding other matters than those fragments of the 
gospels and the epistles, that the church has selected to be 
read to the people during public worship, every Sunday 
throughout the year. Until this day he imagined that they 
composed the whole of the Word of God." 

There are two things a man wants, in order to get at 



2I 4 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



religious truth. One is the right of private judgment, 
and the other is some infallible, some perfect standard of 
truth, with which to compare his own thoughts. As 
against the Pope, as against Councils, Luther's dictum 
was like any other man's. But with the Word of God 
behind him, his dictum ceased to be his own, and became 
God's. So he goes on, in his reply to the Chancellor of 
Treves : " Unless, therefore, I am convinced by the testi- 
mony of Scripture, or by the clearest reasoning, unless 
they thus render my conscience bound by the Word of 
God, I cannot, and I will not retract; for it is unsafe for a 
Christian to speak against his conscience." 

Freedom of thought under the guidance of God's holy 
Word is one thing ; freedom of thought irrespective of 
God's holy Word is wholly another. One makes an in- 
telligent Christian, the other makes a free thinker. The 
Bible is no more a revelation of God than is creation. 
God has put His thoughts into His works ; this is creation. 
He has put His thoughts into human language ; this is rev- 
elation. The man who undertakes to form a Kosmos for 
himself without studying God's works, is no greater sim- 
pleton than he who undertakes to form a system of re- 
ligious belief without the Bible. And he is just as compe- 
tent to do the one as the other. There was a time when 
astronomy was the science of conjecture and speculation ; 
and there was no change for the better till men would 
study the facts of the case ; the great systems of worlds, 
not as men conceived them to move in space, but as they 
actually moved there ; as the telescope and the mathe- 
matician revealed them. In Luther's time men were 
taught a system of religious belief as far from the truth 
as astrology is from astronomy. It was an outrageous 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



215 



travesty upon the truth. What Luther did was to take 
the grand moral Kosmos of the Bible, and set it again as 
a firmament over men's heads and lives, that they might 
look up into it and find inspiration and peace. For the 
soul of man without the Bible, is like the earth without 
the stooping skies. 

There is nothing more Providential in the life of Lu- 
ther than his forcible, but friendly, seizure and confine- 
ment in the Castle of Wartburg. There he was a pris- 
oner, and yet getting ready for his great battles. He 
wanted to give Germany the Word of God in its own 
language. There he was safe, there he had leisure. The 
whole nation were groping for light, just as he was, when 
by accident he encountered the Bible in the Erfurth Uni- 
versity ; and when he had given Germany the Bible the 
Reformation was established. The Roman Catholic 
Church has always been afraid of the Bible in the hands 
of the people. It is so to-day. The Bible makes some 
of its doctrines, just as puerile and ridiculous as the facts 
of physical science make the old astrology and chemistry 
of that period. 

Doubtless men make mistakes in the interpretation of 
the Bible ; go off into extravagances ; put things into the 
Bible which the Holy Spirit never wrote there. But bet- 
ter so, ten thousand times, than that the people have no 
Bible. As against the errors of doctrine and of practice, 
which fallible men are sure to bring into a religious sys- 
tem, the people have no protection but their own personal 
study of the Bible. We see in our day men gravely ar- 
guing for the restoration into the Christian system of a 
kind of Protestant purgatory, an illustration of the at- 
tempt to read into the Bible a dogma of the middle ages. 



2l6 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



And there is nothing which makes it surer that they will 
fail than the fact that the people are studying the Bible. 

3. Luther stood for faith against works, as the ground 
of salvation. 

The sale of indulgences to commit sin, Tetzel's mis- 
sion, was legitimate on the theory of salvation by works. 
If a man, having sinned, could be released from sin's 
penalty by the payment of certain penances ; by the pay- 
ment of certain gifts into the treasury of the church ; by 
going upon certain pilgrimages ; why might he not make 
advance-payment before committing the sin? Luther's 
climbing of that Pilate's Staircase was on the principle 
of Tetzel's sales. It was proposed to him thus : " Here, 
Martin Luther, make your way up those stairs on your 
knees, and the Pope grants you beforehand certain indul- 
gences." Tetzel only said to the people : " Here, you 
people, pay me so much money, and I forgive you be- 
forehand." He only sold the Pope's indulgences, in- 
stead of the Pope's absolvo te. 

Says the historian : " Luther was seated one day in the 
confessional at Wittemberg. Many of the townspeople 
came successively and confessed that they were guilty of 
great excesses. Adultery, licentiousness, usury, ill-gotten 
gains ; such are the crimes acknowledged to the minister 
of the Word by the souls of which he will have one day 
to give account. He reprimands, corrects, instructs. 
But what is his astonishment when these individuals reply 
that they will not abandon their sins, appealing to their 
letters of indulgence ! " You tell me Martin Luther at- 
tacked the Roman Catholic Church? This man Tetzel, 
the commissioner of the Pope, the Pope's pedle'r of in- 
dulgence-wares, comes into the fold of which Martin 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



217 



Luther is the guardian and keeper, under God Himself, 
and attempts to destroy the souls committed to his charge; 
to buy and sell under his very eye. Luther only stood 
for his flock. He only plucked those sheep that Tetzel 
was fleecing out of the mouth of that wolf which sat upon 
the seven hills of Rome. 

No doubt works have to do with salvation. They have 
the same relation to it that fruit has to the life of a tree. 
They spring from its life ; they prove that it has life. 
But the works which the Roman Catholic Church then 
encouraged were dead works. Luther had tried them in 
convent life ; the hair shirt, flagellations, fastings. They 
did not answer the purpose. He found something better. 
And this is his confession on that point : " Well, then, I, 
Dr. Martin Luther, unworthy herald of the gospel of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, confess this article, that faith alone 
without works justifies before God. and I declare that it 
shall stand and remain forever in despite of the Emperor 
of the Romans, the Emperor of the Turks, the Emperor 
of the Tartars, the Emperor of the Persians ; in spite of 
the Pope and all the cardinals, with the bishops, priests, 
monks, and nuns ; in spite of kings, princes and nobles ; 
and in spite of all the world and of devils themselves ; 
and that, if they endeavor to fight against this truth, they 
will draw the fires of hell upon their heads. This is the true 
and holy Gospel, and the declaration of me, Dr. Luther, 
according to the teaching of the Holy Ghost." And 
little as it might be expected', Luther made this discovery 
in Rome. It flashed in upon his soul, as light from the 
very throne of God. And he went so far in his revulsion 
from the doctrine of salvation by works, as to doubt the 
authenticity of the Epistle of St. James ; which is but the 



218 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



complement to St. Paul's discussion of the doctrine of 
salvation by faith. 

4. Luther stood for the family as an institution from 
God ; as divine, as worthy the approval of the Creator. 

The doctrine of the celibacy of the clergy, is one of 
the corrupting influences of Romanism. Take D'Aubigne's 
picture of that period: " Domestic peace and conjugal 
fidelity, these surest foundations of happiness here below, 
were continually disturbed in town and country, by the 
gross passions of priests and monks. They took advan- 
tage of the access allowed them into every family, and 
sometimes even, of the confidence of the confessional, to 
instill a deadly poison into the souls of their penitents ; 
and to satisfy their guilty desires. The Reformation, by 
abolishing the celibacy of the Ecclesiastics, restored the 
sanctity of the conjugal state. The marriage of the clergy 
put an end to an immense number of secret crimes. The 
reformers became the model of their flocks, in the most 
intimate and important relations of life ; and the people 
were not slow in rejoicing to see the ministers of religion 
once more husbands and fathers." 

All this talk of celibacy as holier, as more acceptable 
to God, and especially far more suitable to clergymen, is 
of man and not of God. All monasteries and nunneries 
are founded upon this theory ; that marriage, paternity 
and maternity, domestic affection, filial affection, the 
training of children ; the offices of social neighborhood ; 
the discharge of the functions of Christian citizenship ; 
are inconsistent with the highest type of Christian char- 
acter. '< If this monk should marry," sa^d his friend, 
lawyer Schurff, " he will make all the world and the devil 
himself burst with laughter, and will destroy the work 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



219 



that he has begun. " " It is incest," exclaimed Henry the 
VIII, who married six wives, divorcing and beheading 
them to suit his convenience. But, the monk did marry, 
and married a nun, and this is what he says about it : 
The best gift of God is a pious and amiable wife, who 
fears God and loves her family ; with whom a man may 
live in peace, and in whom he may safely confide." And 
this was, doubtless, his picture of his Ketha, or his Lord 
Ketha, as he sometimes playfully called her. The historian 
gives us a portrait of her, sitting by the side of her hus- 
band in his weariness ; cheering him with passages from 
the Word of God ; working his likeness in embroidery ; 
and amusing him with the childlike simplicity of her 
questions. His own letters to her overflow with the 
greatest tenderness. From the stormy scenes of the Re- 
formation, it is delightful to think of this great-hearted 
man, seated amid that circle of children, which soon 
clustered around him ; employing himself with music, of 
which he was so fond ; under his own vine and fig-tree, 
overshadowed by the wings of the God in whom he 
trusted. There was tempest without ; there was peace 
within. 

My brothers, you and I are not Lutherans, are not Ger- 
mans. But we cannot afford to be anything but Luther- 
ans and Germans, to-day. We should be unworthy to be 
classed as descendants of the Pilgrims, as intelligent 
Americans, did we forget the memory of Martin Luther. 
He fought our battles for us. And not till it reached 
the Mother Country, not till it reached our own Free 
Republic, did the Reformation have the scope and 
verge it needed. Luther is dead and buried, but his 
soul is marching on. Reformation is done for all 



220 



MARTIN LUTHER. 



time to come. Pope's indulgences, Pope's bulls, Luther 
exploded them forever. They never can come back, so 
long as Luther is remembered. The right of private 
judgment ; the right of every man to have his own Bible; 
to read and interpret for himself; the dogma of salvation 
by faith ; these doctrines he stood for, so heroically, as to 
put men in debt to him, till time shall be no more. 

"Like a mighty army, moves the church of God ! 
Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod ; 
We are not divided, all one body we ; 
One in hope and doctrine, one in charity. 
Crowns and thrones may perish, Kingdoms rise and wane 
But the church of Jesus, constant will remain ; 
Gates of hell can never 'gainst that church prevail, 
We have Christ's own promise, and that cannot fail." 



I 



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